


Volary

by venus woman and giant saurian (grayglube)



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Angst, Bad Feels, F/F, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Underage Sex, the gods flip a coin
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-08-12
Updated: 2018-09-10
Packaged: 2018-12-13 05:10:59
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 11
Words: 43,566
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11752737
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/grayglube/pseuds/venus%20woman%20and%20giant%20saurian
Summary: He has torn her heart from her, a dragon, hungry for her lifeblood. She is wounded by him.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Something I thought up for a valarmorekinks prompt but went way darker than the prompt. Originally meant to be a oneshot but it became obvious as I came back to writing it that it was at least a three part piece. 
> 
> As an aside I want to say that to what extent an author tags their fic is personal choice and I oftentimes make a decision to not to use archive warnings. I encourage any reader on AO3 to read the FAQ on tags and to reach out to authors if you're unsure of whether you might encounter triggering content in their work. 
> 
> You can find me on tumblr as whatwouldflorencedo or glubefics, I write heavy stuff and this particular work is no exception.

Lauded as it is by some, a topic of scorn for others, she has made no presumptions of her place at court. She’s prayed in the sept for the good fortune of it and if she’s ever cursed it then it has only been in the places where the eyes of the old gods might see, for no one but her visits the godswood in the Red Keep.

 

The scorn and derision that’s never given full voice, murmured behind her and following her as if it's the train of some newly made dress has never been far enough away for her to shun the whisper of it as nothing more than the wind.

 

It might be her beauty, she knows, but it isn’t. Such lies are only fit to come from Septas soothing their young wards.

 

It is not simple envy that turns words into lashes. It is not simply the words.

 

Besides that, the Lady Margaery is beautiful and few scorn her.

 

She knows what it’s been from the beginning. She’s weary from it all, she finds, leaving the tourney behind.  

 

It was always only that she’d taken the place of the one who had come to fill another’s, their lives are a tangled thing of too many strands to unweave back onto their separate spools.

 

They are all so very alike she’s found, even if she’s never known a mistress to be anything but a woman performing some duty another might already perform with the rightful title of _wife_ , or _queen_.

 

Her own title is much less kind.

 

Sometimes, though, some do not deign to place such a weight on her and there are many at court who have come to love her as they loved the Lady Margaery for her charity and good humor or as they still love their Queen for her gentle fragility and kindness.

 

Sometimes she is only the Lady Sansa Stark.

 

For her, perhaps it is her sparsity, her appearance followed once more by an absence that makes the court and the common people tolerate her with such benediction.

 

Bards and minstrels have sung of her and called her likeness like the moon, bright then gone, some changing thing to catch sight of in full glory for only a brief aspect of time before it is hidden again.

 

It had not been her intention at the start to make a mystery of herself it was only that the court had seem so big, much larger than she ever thought it could be as she dreamed southron dreams of it in the cold of her norther home, and Margaery who had been mistress before her was so well loved already that she’d found no sudden need to usurp a position she was not yet fit to hold herself.

 

The King has never minded and has never chided her for meekness of despondency.

 

She has been a good mistress, she knows.

 

She plays the high harp still and learned the bells as a child.

 

The King taught her.

 

She played for Margaery when she would come to court more frequently, her only friend for the longest long time.

 

Margaery taught her too.

 

Time has gone on and The King has been pleased with her.

 

And now, at six and ten and a of lady of the high court, she has been the King’s mistress all through the long winter which has spanned five long years and the Lady Margaery has returned.

 

She is no fool. She knows what is to come and of late had been contemplating what her life will soon become.

 

Lady Margaery had been two and ten when she became the King’s mistress and had already been a woman well grown by the time Sansa came to court.

 

Margaery had been older then than Sansa is now when she was put aside, but despite her beauty and fairness the King has not summoned her to his chambers or visited her own for two moons and she knows that it is not because she is not pleasing, it is only that she has grown too fast.

 

The court is festive and a night past she played the high harp for Myrcella Baratheon who has come to court with her mother.

 

Myrcella Baratheon is beautiful and has seen only nine years, born in winter but knowing only summer the daughter of the woman they call the most beautiful of the realms is golden and pink with a voice that is high and sweet.

 

A girl, as she once was.

 

It is now, after Robert Baratheon has died fighting the Ironborn, that Lady Cersei and her pretty daughter have come as royal guests on a request from the King’s own council, for a King pens his own letters very seldom.

 

It is not an easy thing to think on and she walks the halls of the castle, finding the quiet of them a balm for her bruised heart. The sounds of the tourney are far away from her and she finds her steps have brought her to where she was once reminded her of home but now finds only a tender ache in the core of her.

 

He’d come to her in the godswood a fortnight past and told her he had decided to take a new mistress, she’d wept and he had kissed her tears, soothing her fears the way he always has before, as gently as when he’d put hands over hers to teach her at his own harp or brushed back her hair into an intricate plait or the first time he’d laid her beneath him and swore to be tender and also true.

 

He’d told her of the Lady Margaery’s return and she’d tried to find peace in the comfort of an old friend’s promised presence but she’d known the truth of it even then, as he’s held her sweetly.

 

It had been the most chaste embrace they’ve ever had that she can remember. His member had not been pressed rigidly against her skirts as she has so often felt before.

 

There is joy to be found she is sure but to think on them is to be led down paths that make her heart darken and her mind unspool towards the unfortunate things she must soon face.

 

Margaery has come only to help instruct the girl who will be the King’s new mistress in such sweet, laborious things she herself was once taught by Margaery who was once only a girl, too.

 

There are happier things to think on, she’s sure, if only they might come as readily to mind as their darker twins.

 

The King has told her softly that she would enjoy the reach of her titles and all he has given to her as gifts until her death, he’d smiled and in that moment he had been as beautiful as something made of song and as terrible as something come out of the dark.

 

She can hear the waters lap the castle’s stone and is startled, suddenly, upon turning towards the smaller paths to come upon a person unexpected in the godswood.

 

In her finery, the woman is some brightly adorned jewel the color of a bleeding sun set in gold. Cersei Baratheon is indeed beautiful.

 

“I did not know you kept faith with the old gods, Lady Baratheon.”

 

The widow considers her. “It is quiet here,” she remarks.

 

“Yes.”

 

The woman some call the most beautiful in the kingdom looks only like other women of distinction who have married well and birthed babes enough to be called good and dutiful, women who have retained some measure of the girls they used to be long after the spring of their youth has past.

 

Cersei Baratheon is well-formed but her daughter is the true beauty.

 

“I am sorry to disturb your prayers.” She means to go but the Lady speaks suddenly.

 

“I am happy,” Lady Cersei says. “For my daughter. You are not a mother so I don’t expect you to understand but I am…sad too, I think.” For a moment the woman looks as if rage might paint over her strong, unmarred features. “She is my daughter and it is very soon she is taken from my arms.”

 

And Sansa cannot help but to agree, silently and without words, instead she tries to give the woman some measure of peace to clutch tightly with both hands so horror might not crawl into her bones. “You are here with her and she will be happier for it.”

 

She remembers her own mother was not.

 

“Yes. Yours left, didn’t she?”

 

It is not a kind memory. She could not hold all such memories in both hands without them flowing over them like rough hewn stones.

 

“Yes. I was lonely in the beginning. But, the King has been the true happiness of my life.”

 

It is not a lie. Neither is it the full truth.

 

And Lady Baratheon does not look as if she believes her.

 

“You are very young still, Lady Stark.” She is told as if it were not a virtue or something to be admired at all but a stain instead.

 

The King has been her greatest sadness. He has been the great sadness of many mothers.

 

“Yes, it is fortunate I think. He’s happy,” she tells the Lady, smiling. “I can tell. And, your daughter will soon be too. Soon.”

 

And, sometimes, he is a fear in the dark. Though, no woman knows of that. Only a handful of girls.

 

Elia Martell had only just flowered at five and ten when she’d wed Rhaegar Targaryen in the Sept of Baelor. The Queen has always been small and as finely boned as a child’s doll.

 

Cersei Baratheon’s face changes then like a cloud covers the sun, darkening its beauty.

 

“I know what the court will say about her, the wretches and the jealous.”

 

The court will say many things, but never where the King may hear.

 

“His Grace does well with keeping such unkindness from becoming a part of our concerns,” she assures the widow.

 

“Is His Grace…a gentle man?”

 

He is a dragon.

 

“He is kind and patient. Before my departure Lady Tyrell will arrive. She will be a great comfort to you daughter.”

 

“Why not you?”

 

Her heart stutters, trapped in the cage of her ribs.

 

“Pardon?”

 

The woman’s eyes are green, like a nightmare of wildfire, or the scales of a great beast.

 

“Why do you not instruct my daughter in lessons of how to please His Grace?”

 

“I am quite an unaccomplished tutor I find.”

 

“You would not have been his mistress long if that were the case. But, I fear I’ve kept you from the tourney, Lady Stark.”

 

The woman’s smile is foul and cruel then and though she does not go on Sansa can hear the words of others hissed through her silence, her own title twisted into something less kind and less pleasant.

 

A mistress is no wife, no queen, no maid but there are many other names to call such women.

 

“I apologize for interrupting your peace. Good day, Lady Baratheon.”

 

“And you, Lady Stark.”

 

The coin that the gods flipped for Rhaegar Targaryen turns over itself, still unmeasured.

 

*     *     *

 

Her time in King’s Landing is almost at an end and though she does not know what’s coming she tries to remain fearless in the face of the unlit future.

 

Water falls through her hands.

 

She sinks lower into her copper tub and thinks on beauty.

 

There is little question that the King is beautiful. He is pretty even, though the delicacy of his face is only in his eyes and his jaw and cheek are sharp.

 

His mouth is a full bower she knows well.

 

He is young still and as vigorous as he is noble.

 

Warmth pools low in her belly, along the inside of her thighs as her fingers trace them.

 

She misses his attentions.

 

It is a hard thing, once one taught to be wanton, to live pretending she has never felt such a hunger for a man’s baser attentions. There is beauty everywhere and it has never made her feel such an ache of wounded emptiness before, perhaps because he is a King and even when he has played upon her body as is trying to make music of her it has never made her feel base.

 

He is noble even in his lust and there is beauty in that too, as there is beauty in her apartments, and her gowns, even her handmaids.

 

His children are beautiful.

 

His sons, the moon and the cloak of night, and his daughter the quicksilver of new stars.

 

She has walked the gardens with Rhaenys who has called her sister and Aegon has asked for her favor before the joust and kissed her when he’d drunk deep of the summer wine two tourneys past, his father had laughed like bells when she’d told him, pleased and amused with his heir though she’d been less so, greedy for only his affections.

 

It is only Jaehaerys who keeps from her with as much distance as befits a stranger returned from the North. He’d gone to see the Wall and many had whispered of his intentions to take the Black. Something she is sure his father would never allow.

 

Upon his return he’d spoken to her briefly of her noble father, his uncle the Lord Eddard Stark and her kind mother.

 

Jaehaerys, she knows, does not speak all that he wishes, he had not that day as they all broke fast in the gardens. His father and his trueborn brother and sister, and herself. He’d near glared at his father, and it’d seemed to her that the gossip might have been true.

 

His intentions to take the Black and the King’s promise to have him tied to the saddle and ridden home if he should think to try such a foolish thing.

 

He is only a bastard but the King loves him as trueborn.

 

She is rising from her bath, musing washed from her, when the King comes to her chambers, splendid in embroidery stitched by her own hand, hair a spill of silver and his face a careful mask.

 

He stares blankly at her wet limbs.

 

And they track between her pale thighs before they pull away and look towards the walls of her chamber.

 

He has not seen her so bare for many moons and the copper floss of her sex has yet again grown full.

 

She wraps herself in a dressing gown and begs forgiveness for her unruliness, cursing her own inattention, she had not thought he would come again.

 

“I had not thought to see you tonight, Your Grace. Will you stay? I can call my maid back so I might arrange myself.”

 

“I shall not stay. I only wished to hear you sing tonight,” he admits.

 

He looks tired, as all Kings must, once the night climbs closer to day. “I am lonely, Sansa,” he tells her with perfect earnestness.

 

His aching hurts her heart, bruises it like the overripe fruit that has fallen from branch to split open to rot fragrantly in the sun.

 

Still, she smiles for him. “Of course. My King.”

 

She dresses and plays for him.

 

He tells her of how beautiful she is, how beautiful she has always been and of the first time he saw her.

 

She can see the tightness in his breeches as he tells her of it.

 

She remembers herself as she was then, dressed in Tully blue and Stark grey, struck by how grand the audience chamber had seemed. He’d seen her in the gallery and then again later, in the gardens as he’d walked with Margaery amongst roses he’d planted for her so would not feel so far from Highgarden.

 

He has always been a thoughtful lover.

 

Margaery had retired from his presence one early day and she’d been beckoned close in his mistress’ absence, pushed forward by Margaery’s own retinue of ladies who all appeared to her both somber and tall.

 

He’d called her a winter rose and her heart had beat so fast.

 

He’d given winter roses to her aunt Lyanna and she’d felt as if she’d been in a song made true.

 

Elia Martell had almost died in childbed, the maesters all said it was because she was so small a girl and so she’d been warned that another child would kill her and the King in his distress and for love of his queen took a mistress for a King’s needs and wants are many and great.

 

They say her aunt Lyanna caught a sweat in her third year in King’s Landing, a royal ward who had already given her King a son.

 

There are, of course, other stories of her aunt Lyanna that she’d only heard later and has readily dismissed more than once as court gossip.

 

The King had by then already written a song for her Aunt with a strain so heartbreaking that to think on it still makes her eyes wet.

 

He is a kind King, who has written songs for each of them, each as different and lovely as the girls themselves.

 

She comes from her harp to her knees before him and put her head on his thigh, softly, like a child might when distressed.

 

His breath is guarded, trapped.

 

He lets her use her mouth to please him, kisses the taste of his seed from her mouth when he’s spent himself across her tongue and her lips, but he looks sharply away from the gaping front of her bedrobe, her breasts heavy and tipped pink, wanting for his hands.

 

*     *     *

 

The Lady Margaery asks if she would enjoy accompanying her to Highgarden for her grandmother’s name day.

 

The Lady Olenna has seen eighty years.

 

She’s told she would even meet Willas, Margaery’s own brother and the heir to all of Highgarden.

 

“They tell stories, I know,” Margaery says, quite aware of just what people say about the heir to Highgarden. “But, Willas is handsome and kind and gallant. I know,” and Margaery laughs at her own self then before she goes on. “I know, how can a man who can’t sit a horse be gallant?” Margaery asks in her subtle way of making herself seems silly and less sharp and she looks ever thoughtful, as she takes pause. “But, he is.” Margaery assures her: “I say that not simply because he is my brother.”

 

“Truly, then?”

 

Margaery grins widely and knocks her hip into hers as they link arms and amble lazily along the paved path.

 

“Even though he is my _favorite_ brother I would not lie to you in this.”

 

And, there have been such very great lies between them before.

 

_‘You will be his ward and he will be as a father to you while yours fights to quell the rebellion on the islands.’_

 

“I had wished to stay, awhile longer,” she admits, for the first time, to Margaery and to herself. It feels strange and good to speak the words, to face that time continues to move past them all. She is a woman grown now and must soon start some new part of her life.

 

“You know what will be announced soon,” Margaery tells her.

 

She waves a hand.

 

Margaery will not take her gaze from her and so she sighs. “I know, I just…I had not thought to be courted, or be a part of a design for marriage, even if it is your very gallant and handsome brother.”

 

“Grandmother _was_ insistent. She thinks you are a ‘dear girl’ and Willas, of course, is quite besotted already.”

 

The conclusion of her time comes upon Sansa so suddenly that she stops in place and leaves Margaery to walk three paces ahead before stopping. She is no longer a little girl. She is no longer so easily taken for a fool.

 

She wonders how a man might yet be besotted with her.

 

Men are not always as kind to her as her King has been, she remembers the poison on their tongues, spat at her, ‘ _king’s whore_ ’.

 

Margaery is beautiful and learned and kind, she takes pains to hide unpleasantness from the joy of each moment but Sansa finds she cannot keep the edge of scorn from her own tone.

 

It is hard to be happy some days.

 

“His Grace has then planned to give to me another gift? How generous.”

 

“He always is,” Margaery says, inclining her head to hers.

 

She shakes her head and pulls free her arm and then her sleeve as Margaery reaches to keep hold of her, a desperate measure from a woman who would appear anything but.

 

“No.” She holds up a hand and considers her status as mistress and how Margaery tries desperately to navigate away from the root of the very topic they discuss.

 

Most mistresses, even the most beautiful or the kindest or the most well loved by the people, never marry unless they were once already wed and put aside by rightful husbands once favored by a king or prince.

 

She’d been too young to be wifed and Margaery was never formally betrothed to any of her suitors. And, It has never been common for a man to wed a King’s former mistress.

 

“How generous?” Sansa asks, because someone must have offered a bride price for her and it would not have been her father.

 

Margaery’s hand falls, she looks more wounded than she has a right to.

 

“San.”

 

Again she waves away Margaery’s words. “My price is high then, so that the heir to Highgarden, the gallant cripple, might have a wife. He’s promised the Red Whore of the Red Keep and for another generation Highgarden will remain the richest of the Seven Kingdoms.” She looks towards the Red Keep and then the harbor. “Our King is kind to both of us.”

 

Margaery does not speak and so she knows she is not wrong, still she feels shrewish for her sharp tongue and ducks her head to watch the fallen blooms dance across the path with the wind.

 

She apologizes for her unruly tongue.

 

“That was cruel. I’m only sad, you see? And, I do not wish to be so far from home. I will not go to Highgarden.” She straightens her sleeves and begins again to walk.

 

Margaery smiles but it is a small, shriveled thing.

 

Sansa remembers then all the lies she has been told.

 

_‘He is the most gallant of men.’_

 

*     *     *

 

“I thought you might like Highgarden.”

 

The way he has phrased it makes it sound the way a question might.

 

She frowns and looks away.

 

“I am afraid I would never see my family again. It’s been so long now.”

 

“You wish to go North?”

 

“Yes.”

 

“The North is a cold place for a flower of a girl.”

 

He used to call her his flowering girl but she’s long since been passed that now. Still, he reaches for her fine white hand, fair and unblemished, calloused perhaps from the harp and her embroidery but he’s always liked that and the way they've felt on his skin.

 

She shakes the past from her thoughts.

 

“It will be difficult, I know. But they are my family.” She smiles softly at him.

 

He is as eager as she is to have things be simple again.

 

This way is best.

 

Her mother had not been pleased when the King made claims on her the way Kings do of pretty girls who can never be their true wives and her father has suffered the brusqueness of her Lady mother for many years because of it, she’s sure.

 

She knows what her mother says; that her father did not protect her must be as constant a strain through his halls as a remembered verse of song through the mind.

 

Robb has scorned her in the scant few letters she has received from him during her years in King’s Landing and Bran’s are so polite that she feels she is receiving the words of some novice courtier. Arya complains of her lessons and relays the terse tidings of their lady mother to her. Rickon had not yet been born when she left.

 

Her father writes of a place to come home to, one day, but there is such coldness, and she has not dreamt of the place she was born as home in many long years, that she knows no one has expected it to ever truly come to pass.

 

She is drawn back to her King as his thumb rubs heat into the pounding of her blood.

 

“Sweet girl, if you will not fold to these tedious and poorly hidden designs of Lady Olenna to steal you away from me then you must take something else. I want to make you happy, still.”

 

He is on his knees before her, he touches at her embroidery hoop, running fingers over her stitches.

 

“I have been happy,” she insists, bleeding her love like she would her life if he asked. “I _am_ happy, here. But, our time has been sweet and it will always be that way.”

 

He holds her by the nape then and kisses her brow, fierce and wild and so very bright. “I understand. You have always been my brave girl. You have leave of my court to go North and I have a gift for you.”

 

His gift to her is a keep, grand and empty after the Bolton rebellion has left no living heirs to inherit the lands.

 

It is a gift equal to her own father’s lands.

 

“Jaehaerys will travel with you, he will be my eyes in the North for some time, might you see to his comfort there, so he knows the peace of home so far away?”

 

He has torn her heart from her, a dragon, hungry for her lifeblood. She is wounded by him. Comfort she knows as many things but rarely does it exclude two bodies concealed together within a bedchamber, seeking respite, sating a hunger.

 

“Of course, my King.” She smiles.

 

She does not weep when he leaves she only waits for tears to come. They do not and she wonders what kind of woman does not weep when parted from a lover.

 

Perhaps it has not been love.

 

And, then, she wonders if it had not been love then what had it been.

 


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Worth mentioning that the Starks in this act a little differently. It's a different dynamic without Sansa. And that instead of a war fought over Lyanna, Ned became Lord of Winterfell after his father and brother died fighting Ironborn in one of many uprisings.

The baggage train is a world all its own, a royal escort seems a grand accompaniment into the North but she knows it's not all for her just as she knows Jaehaerys would rather nothing more than a small retinue. She believes he's managed to convince himself that the fanfare is something she’s brought upon them rather than a mark of his own unwanted station.

 

Sometimes, she thinks he would rather be outside of his own father’s love.

 

And, she cannot fathom such a thing easily after having been under such love for much of her own life.

 

They ride often as a pair at the start of the long column as she has no reason to stay to the train and there is no one to speak to there. She has left many of her ladies behind, they would have only grown to resent her for taking them so far from gardens and tourneys and the southern warmth of what is said to be the start of a long summer.

 

At Riverun there's a feast in honor of the King's household, ' _his bastard and his whore'_ she hears whispered about the stables, it is hard to avoid such things but easy to ignore them.

 

Her grandfather, in his dottage, mistakes her for her mother and she does not seek to correct him until he remarks upon the dark figure of her own cousin, though she’s never called him so herself, as Lord Stark.

 

She puts a hand on the old man's arm and he leans into her so he might hear her better. “Grandfather, it is His Grace’s son, Lord Jaehaerys,” she supplies, a half-whisper into the old man’s ear, avoiding any mention of surname or the taint of bastardy that might prompt other voices to drop low as quickly as ears would perk up.

 

Her cousin looks neither offended nor amused at the old man’s confusion and slowly fading endurance. She gestures towards the ever-close maester and watches her grandfather excuse himself from the hall.

 

Her younger uncle sits in her grandfather’s place beside the King’s son and she beside the other who has never lost the taint of his own name, _Blackfish_ the rest might call him but in her letters as in her meeting of him she has only ever called him Uncle.

 

“You look like your mother. She will glad to lay eyes on you.”

 

“I am hopeful that she will be happy to see me.”

 

“She will.”

 

“…”

 

“She might be too stubborn to act it, but you know that.”

 

“I do.”

 

He does not ask if she is well, but he clasps a hand to her shoulder and smiles as best he can before he takes leave of the feast which is more than Edmure does, he slides nervous eyes towards her as if she might open her bodice or raise her skirts during the meal.

 

She retires long before the rest of her retinue, begging leave from her uncle and her King’s son.

 

*     *     *

 

She rides ahead, she would not have done so in any other circumstance but her pride stings and her mood is black.

 

So close to the place where she was born, the cold has made her sharp and turned her bold.

 

He’d been without a cloak or furs astride his destrier. Her mare trotting beside his, making her, for once, sit lower than himself in height. It is but a scant difference besides. _“The cold does not bother you, my lord?”_ She'd remarked and made sound like a question.

 

_“No.”_

 

_“I suppose it would have been colder the last you came North.”_

 

He had made no reply.

 

She’d breathed deep and been happy for a moment longer until she opened her eyes and caught sight of the knights riding behind them and their unhidden grins. He'd noticed too.

_“Is it not, perhaps, improper for a lady to ride ahead of her knights?”_

_“Perhaps, if I had knights, my Lord, it might be considered such.”_

 

_“Or for a lady to ride beside a man at the head of the column?”_

_“Are you not my cousin, my Lord?”_

_“Are you not another man’s mistress, my lady?”_

 

Her blood had chilled in her veins, his callous cruelty at what he might look riding beside her, his own pride bruised by a lesser man's sniggers.

 

The knights had gone silent behind them even as they rode closer to catch words as washerwomen might pretend to scrub clothes while listening to their neighbors' complaints. She had smiled, as sweetly as she’d once been given lessons in by her Septa when she had still had one.

 

 _“_ _Have we not come to my own father’s lands, my lord?”_

 

He nodded, only once, hard.

 

_“Might I ride ahead then if you are unsure of the route we might take? I believe I remember the way home to Winterfell.”_

 

She had not waited, only put heels to her mare and rode ahead of him and his knights, for surely they were his and not her own, as any of her own would have followed their lady.

 

And, she is a lady, and he, though of royal seed is still called by his bastard name of Waters, and as such her rank, while not above his, is no less than equal for as long as he remains unrecognized in the succession of his father’s throne.

 

She is unsure if that is why his pride is so great he risks choking on it.

 

*     *     *

 

She rides into Winterfell ahead of the train, though two knights had been sent after, catching up after having rode a hard pace, sent by their royal liege for even he would have been scolded by his father, favorite as he is, if he were to let her ride unescorted.

 

The yard is a sudden frenzy, whipped up by the tempest of their arrival.

 

It is Robb she gains sight of first and then her father’s ward.

 

Theon Greyjoy goads her brother later as the rest of the household assembles, softly but still heard. “I’ve always liked red heads.” He and her brother stand behind her father and mother, and behind even Bran and Arya and Rickon. Far enough to show displeasure but not enough to yet be considered rude.

 

Robb scowls but his smirk is not far from his mouth and inclined head. “You aren’t a King,” she hears him tell Theon Greyjoy.

 

Theon looks as if he might go on but her brother stalls any other words with more of his own. “You aren’t a prince either, Greyjoy.”

 

If possible, Theon’s grin turns sharper. “Your sister is a very fine woman, my lord.” And, his smirk, if not kind, is not something born completely of contempt for her. Once, Theon was more than just as ward, much how she was more than a king's property.

 

Her brother snorts, disapproval and displeasure plain in the set of his shoulders and how he does not turn to face her.

 

She is used to such things from men.

 

*     *     *

 

She stands beside her sister and Bran, demures as she takes the place her elder brother should stand if he were not so hateful as to try and skulk between the blacksmith and ostler just to spite her.

 

Her father had seemed so joyful, her mother had smiled her small sad smile and while it had not been a grand welcome it had been better than she'd expected.

 

At her side her Arya prods her at the waist, she bends down her ear to hear her sister's words.

 

“Robb is sulking because he isn’t the prettiest one here now.”

 

She smiles at Arya whose face breaks into a wide white grin of girlish amusement.

 

Her sister tugs again.

 

“He’s just mad since there’s no room at the high table for him with you and the prince here.”

 

She does not smile then, only corrects, as the gates open for the very man they speak of.

 

“He is a lord, not a prince. But, you may call him cousin.”

 

“He said I could call him Jon.”

 

What she would like to say, if she had the well-formed words ready on her tongue, would be a question, but there is no time for such things as his retinue enters the yard.

 

She pulls herself straight and presses a hand between Arya’s shoulders so she too might stand at her full height, as such things are important for girls to do if they would one day be called ladies.

 

*     *     *

 

There is little time for pleasant tidings before they are feasted properly as there is simply too much that must be attended to or arranged. She washes the King’s Road from her skin and wishes too that she might wash away her weariness.

 

It is her mother’s maid that attends her with an aged smile and rougher hands than she is used to.

 

She might yet dress herself and plait her own hair.

 

She sends the woman back to the kitchens.

 

The stones are soaked with warmth against her bare feet and she breathes deep of a place that, if not yet home again, feels far less heavy than the Red Keep ever did. The stones give her only silence as she stands unattended and so simply bare. It is quiet but in it is a measure of closeness that empties her mind of the long journey and the small display of happiness that she will soon need to feign for her father.

 

There is a heavy, hollow sound against her door and her name spoken in a voice that had been the same as she'd imagined all the time she's been away from it.

 

She bids her sister to enter and remembers herself quite suddenly as Arya rushes in, a tangle of limbs not yet used to their own length, and the harsh inhale of a breath and slammed shut door rings sounds across the chamber.

 

“I didn’t know you were-…” Arya has looked away from her with stained cheeks and offended modesty.

 

“It’s alright, she tells her, wrapping herself in a swath of fur.

 

Arya avoids looking at her until she is well concealed in the folds of bearskin.

 

“I could have waited.”

 

“I’m used to it.” She crosses the room to look over the small collection of gowns her own mother had assembled for her before she’d arrived.

 

“Because of the King?” her sister asks, hands twisting together until the knuckles pop. She watches Arya shake out her hands, unused to the attention of someone who won’t as easily chastise her as her septa must for such habits.

 

“No. Not that,” she says. “I had three maids and you become very used to being stripped and scrubbed and dressed.”

 

She points at the blue gown of heavy wool.

 

Arya’s face twists as she shakes her head.

 

“If you were fat I might believe you would need two maids, but I think you’re lying about having three," Arya says and points a thin finger tipped with a raggedly chewed nail towards the green brocade trimmed in the brown fur.

 

“It’s true.”

 

And, they laugh as only sisters might.

 

She steps into her shift to belay her sister’s discomfort though she is used to securing her stockings first. “May I visit you?” Arya asks her, sitting beside her on the bed, as she ties the ribbons to the tops of her woolens.

 

“Of course you may.”

 

The quiet rises again.

 

“Father was in the godswood often.”

 

“Praying to the old gods for kind weather on the King’s Road? Can you lace this?”

 

Her sister comes behind her to pull tight the stays of her gown, speaking as she yanks the cords. 

 

“No. I mean, he’s always spent a lot of time there. Mother doesn’t go, she goes to the sept sometimes, not as much as she used to.”

 

“What of you?”

 

Arya reaches fingers to untangle the ends of her hair.

 

“Sometimes I get to go to the wolfswood with Jory. _If_ I finish my lessons with my Septa. And, sometimes Robb lets Theon teach me the bow. Father pretends not to know. I think.”

 

“The bow?”

 

“I’m better than Bran.”

 

Her sister’s grin is a thing of careful happiness, fragile but sweet in its hopefulness. She thinks she is one that should never be sent south.

 

“You will have to show me before I leave.”

 

The smile widens, stuck fast.

 

“You will need to call it something less awful than ‘dreadfort,’ I’ll think about it for you.”

 

“Thank you.”

 

“I’m leaving. I’ll see you in the hall.”

 

“Alright.”

 

The door shuts heavily with a thick sound.

 

The room crowds close, suffocating and stale.

 

*     *     *

 

She sits beside her mother and gives her the tidings of her uncle and brother and is met, in return, with stalled words and careful nods. Her cousin looks at ease beside her father, they talk together and seem to be happy. They look alike when they brood and her father calls him Jon.

 

Her mother asks for her company and as they rise together the entire hall mimics them, her brother rises slowly and stands for only as long as necessary.

 

In the quiet of the sept her father built for her mother the scent of oil and candles swaths them like the dark cloak of half-light and silence that the Stranger wears, her mother reaches for her hand.

 

“Have you been well.”

 

“Very well,” she assures her.

 

“I’ve missed you, Sansa.”

 

There are deep lines around her mother’s eyes and mouth.

 

She moves past her to light the candles at the base of each of the Seven. They are only small idols carved carefully, albeit simply, they do not stand as high as a child, much less men.

 

“I’ve missed you,” she tells her mother but there is a hollow in her chest, behind her heart.

 

“And now you are home.”

 

She breathes deep of the sept’s scents and her mother’s shadow falls heavily over the façade of the Smith.

 

She wonders if what has been broken might truly be forged anew again. The open door of the sept knocks against the stone and the votives dance in the breath of wind that is swept between them.

 

“For a while.”

 

Her mother is standing beside her then, tall and stern in her black gown. “Are you still beholden to the King’s wishes?”

 

She shakes her head and stares only at the tiny flames.

 

“No,” she says. “I don’t think so.” She shakes her head again and looks at the woman whose face might be her own in time. “It matters not. I don’t seek anything he would not give should I ask it of him.”

 

Her mother’s smile is as wavering  water. “That is...good.”

 

“I will miss...-” Her words die in the dark as her mother interrupts to speak.

 

“Why did you come here?”

 

She has no answer for her.

 

Her mother doesn't look at her. “I thought you would stay in the South.”

 

“I might have.”

 

“Why come then?”

 

“Do you wish I hadn't?”

 

Her mother sighs. “It’s only difficult sometimes to think you are here, with me. That you are home now. I suppose I'd grown used to your absence, it hurt but only as an ache. Now it bleeds.”

 

She turns from the altars of her mother’s gods. “I’m sorry. I’ve upset you.” 

 

Her mother’s mouth is open, words on her tongue that Sansa will not let fall. “Please, stay,” she tells her. “I will make my own way back to my rooms. It was good to see you again, mother.”

 

And so she leaves.

 

Last time it had been her mother.

 

Last time they had both been south.

 

*     *     *

 

In the rising light of dawn a figure comes from between the gatehouse and the stables.

 

Theon Greyjoy lopes like a wolf where he walks, if one might call it a walk. He circles, he stalks, the girls used to giggle, she remembers, now, they eye him with something that is half wary and half waiting for him to take hold of them.

 

He’s a man grown and something strange in northern furs, lean and dark, beardless with his hand curled around a longbow, a dirk in his belt, a very fine cloak around his narrow shoulders.

 

There’s a dead thing hanging from his gloved hand.

 

It's only a rabbit with a put out eye.

 

“My lady,” he greets.

 

She inclines her head towards his grisly prize. “True aim.”

 

His smile is sly and happy, he’s always been endlessly amused with himself. “It didn’t feel a thing,” he assures her.

 

She raises a shoulder and a hand, almost jaunty. “A kind hunter, who knew?”

 

“Are you teasing me, Lady Stark?”

 

“I'm afraid I am not.”

 

“You don’t have to lie, my lady.”

 

“I have no cause for lies, Theon.”

 

“Might I walk with you then?”

 

“If you would like.”

 

And, he follows a half step behind, almost on her heels. “Do they hunt much in King’s Landing?” he asks.

 

“Often enough.” She must turn her head to look upon him.

 

“Have you ever gone?” Theon asks.

 

“I would more often hawk.”

 

She greets the men of her King’s household who have come with her cousin’s retinue, readying for the ride further north. Theon looks towards the stables. “And do you ride? My lady?”

 

“I made it here on a horse, did I not.”

 

“Side saddle, I noticed.”

 

“It is the custom when arriving for a lady to dismount from side saddle, not astride.”

 

“Is it?” Theon hands the rabbit to a young groom, kicking lightly at the boy as he runs towards the kitchen, laughing.

 

She smiles and for a moment she enjoys the respite of it.

 

Her brother rounds the corner, a long bow of his own in hand but no rabbit, his scowl is something vicious. “I don’t see what difference it would make.”

 

“Robb,” she half-greets, warns.

 

“I’d thought you’d be making ready to leave by now,” he tells her.

 

“I am not the one to make such preparations, our cousin sees to it.” Though, she is sure he knows already.

 

Her brother’s scowl slowly fades.

 

“I have a problem I cannot solve, perhaps if I put it to you I might have a solution,” he says, his sudden friendliness suspicious to her.

 

Theon looks away, head tucked low. A dark look crawls across his face. He looks harried and cross.

 

“What is this problem?” she asks her brother.

 

“If it is your keep that you ride to then is it you who is _his_ mistress now or our cousin who is  _yours_?”

 

Theon looks as if he might wish to walk away but even he wouldn't dare walk from her brother’s presence without asking leave of it, his eyes keep moving back to her, waiting, he dares not smile now. She wonders if he thinks she's a rabbit.

 

She wonders if her brother would like to put out her eye to balm his own false wounds.

 

She smiles then, soft and sharp and a perfect imitation of good nature. “Lord Jaehaerys might better answer that question. I’m not privy to his intentions or of the women who might be his mistresses."

 

Robb scowls openly once more and Theon’s own mouth has parted in silence, she goes on.

 

“I was under the assumption that he was riding to The Last Hearth and not my own lands. Perhaps I should put the question to father. It seems silly to be accompanied by our cousin who has more pressing concerns when it might be you and Theon who ride with me to my keep.”

 

“What a charitable thought, Lady Sansa,” Theon remarks. The glare her brother shoots him is chilling but Theon Greyjoy only smirks, self-assured and endlessly amused until he must jump to catch the bow her brother throws at him.

 

She smiles too, taking her leave with her skirts moving over the sparse greenery of the revived earth.

 

*     *     *

She finds him in the godswood.

 

He sees her but keeps silent until she greets him first.

 

“Hello.”

 

“It's been a long time.”

 

“Yes.”

 

“Your mother has missed you.”

 

“I’ve missed all of you.”

 

Her father rises and claps her shoulder before he pulls her close and puts a dry kiss to her brow. “If you would like to stay I would allow it. You are my daughter.”

 

“I ride to the Dreadfort tomorrow.”

 

He looks no more aggrieved after she says the words as he had before.

 

“I have a few men and a kitchen girl I can give you for your household.”

 

“Thank you.”

 

They walk a ways together, along the path beside the warm pools and the grand sentinels. “I have been here for a long time,” he tells her. She touches at the garden, carefully tended through the winter and just starting to grow.

 

“It’s not so cold now,” she says.

 

“I’ve thought about what I might say to you.”

 

“It’s alright you know. There's nothing to be said now.” She does not need an apology for the past from him, they have all been as helpless as children. What could he have done?

 

“But it is not.”

 

“It’s past. And, it is gone.”

 

“I could find a Lord for you, strong and kind, a good man, if that is something you wish,” he tells her solemnly.

 

“I do not.”

 

He is as still as the weirwood’s carved face.

 

No man is only good and kind and strong, men are many things at once.

 

She smiles then.

 

“What northern lord would take the place of a King? I am blessed by the seven and the old gods for such an offer. But, I think it best that I arrange my own household.”

 

He looks very sad she thinks.

 

She longs to wipe away the darkest years he’s had to live from his wrinkled brow and the lines of her mother’s face.

 

“Perhaps one day, but not today. Not so soon,” she says to him then.

 

“Might I ask a question?” her father asks.

 

“You may.”

 

“Have you been a mother to some child still in the south.”

 

The question surprises her. “No,” she tells him in earnest.

 

He nods, his face washed of some heavy thought. “Then you left nothing behind.”

 

“Nothing important,” she assures.

 

He nods again and she thinks of her life in the Red Keep.

 

She’s left nothing important there, only her heart but it would surely turn too readily to ice so far north for it to be of any further use to her.

 

*     *     *

 

“You don’t look sad to be leaving.”

 

“It has not been my home in many years.” She tells the son of the king, his presence has been scarce during their shared stay in Winterfell. She’d wondered where he’d spent the time between meals but has remained without answer.

 

“You didn’t look sad when we left King's Landing.”

 

She has no answer for him and she wonders why he would remark upon such a thing in the first place. She pulls the reins of her mare and moves her from the yard.

 

Her mother has not come to see her off, saying if she were to then it would turn Rickon unruly, Rickon who rides for The Last Hearth too, to be fostered by the Umbers.

 

Her father had ridden out with Robb before dawn for the Wolf’s Den to discuss a betrothal to one of Lord Manderly’s granddaughters.

 

It had been Bran, edging closer to her own height with each passing day that had handed her the reins and wished her a good journey and fair weather.

 

It is Arya who rides out from Winterfell like some untethered storm to weep messily from her own saddle, calling her a stupid girl and giving her goodbyes like they might never see each other again. It feels like the departure they might have had many years ago had they both been older.

 

She feels as if she’s being mourned, more so under her cousin's somber stare who only recieves a half remembered 'goodbye jon,' himself.

 

 

*     *     *

 

Their party splits at Long Lake, they north for The Last Hearth and her south for her lands beyond the Lonely Hills.

 

Theon rides beside her, in place of her father or Robb. She takes notice of his sharp face in relief realizing she could have him if she’d wanted such a thing. He’d let her with no protest, he wouldn’t give warning, perhaps he might chance some small command so he might yet act a man but she does not think she would mind such a small thing as his pride.

 

In the hills a hunting party of Umber men stop to give greeting and offer their escort to her empty keep. She envisions how she must look, a King’s Mistress, one of the most beautiful women of the realm in her northern furs and the finely embroidered wolf across the breast of an equally fine dress made by her own hands, their eyes roam her like the landscape rolls with hills.

 

She thinks of Margaery and her easy kindness, her graceful hands and her clear voice always with some tinkling laugh of joy beneath her words and it is suddenly too easy a thing to make men turn to babes, rapt and wet mouthed. 

 

The Umber party make assurances that they will feast her properly within a fortnight at The Last Hearth.

 

They leave and she rides on until merlons rise in the distance. The sun is setting and in its bloody descent the Dreadfort looks as a place from a story of terrors would, a child-eating mouth on the horizon or a giant’s grisly smile of black teeth.

 

Theon’s grin is wide and white, he tosses his long dark hair like a woman, he is anything but girlish, even in his vanity, even then.

 

She might almost pretend him a dark mirror to a man she finds herself missing and hating in turn, he is pretty enough and in half-light she might pretend.

 

They water the horses at the head of the Weeping Water. The men stare but dare not steer their mounts closer. She is not simply the daughter of the Lord, now.

 

She is a woman grown, once claimed by the King. Her own authority is heady, never would she think as a girl hiding behind her mother’s skirts that she might one day stand beside a man like Theon Greyjoy outside of a father or brother’s guarded gaze.

 

“They say there are rooms below the Dreadfort where Roose Bolton’s bastard would skin men alive.”

 

She levels him with a look her mother might have given her as a child. “They say too that the torches are held by the dead hands of the men they’ve murdered,” she says banally.

 

She looks at the Dreadfort, it is a fine castle with good land that the Weeping Water runs through, sheep bellow in the hills around them and the stones were laid by men who called themselves the Red Kings of Winter.

 

“You’ve heard about what happened to the Boltons, haven’t you?”

 

“Yes,” she says simply. “They died.”

 

She allows him to help her mount again. He pats her mare’s flank keeping his eyes low as he continues to speak, his smile hiding in the corners of his eyes.

 

“Ramsay Snow killed Roose Bolton’s trueborn son, Domeric. Then he killed Roose Bolton.”

 

She waits, knowing how men like to brag of their achievements, to be lauded as the heroes of their own lives. She knows what happened at the Dreadfort, the King had praised her father for having a son such as Robb, for it was Robb they said that took the fort.

 

But, that is not the only truth to be heard.

 

She scoffs gently.

 

“This castle can be held for two years under a siege. He should have stayed inside.”

 

“He tried,” Theon assures her.

 

“Is this the part where you tell me how you did it?”

 

Theon looks up at her then, as happily as a recognized child would.

 

“I don’t know how wise that would be, Lady Sansa.”

 

“Oh?”

 

“Ladies get to keep all of their own secrets while expecting men to give away all of theirs.” He swings back into his saddle.

 

Their horses trot together.

 

“I thought only girls traded secrets, Theon.”

 

“I thought Lord’s daughters rode in carriages surrounded by guards.”

 

“That sounds like some idle fancy.”

 

“Does it?” He gazes at her more fully and she looks only at the distance and thinks of Margaery.

 

“Something a boy from the Iron Island dreams up,” she says. “Is it more exciting you think to steal a woman from a carriage surrounded by bannermen or find that such a thing does not stand in the way and you might avoid the trouble of a fight?’

 

Theon Greyjoy laughs like cracking ice, she smiles despite herself. When he’s settled he leans over the pommel, long hair falling across his horse’s mane, his eyes peer askance at the castle walls as they come into the shadow of the gatehouse.

 

If they were in King’s Landing noble women would whisper of him, curious, in the north he is only a hostage ward.

 

“Stealing isn't the same as fighting. Climbing hooks, when the moon’s dead a man might be over a wall like this in the hour of the wolf when the guards’ eyes start to go heavy during third watch.”

 

“That’s how Wildlings steal women.”

 

“Or how boys from Pyke kill bastards named Snow who think they can survive a siege.”

 

Yes, she thinks, women would indeed be curious about him if he were a part of some southern court. He looks so very proud to have told someone of what he has done, of how it was him and not her brother Robb.

 

She is the only one he might tell, the only one who wouldn’t punish him for the truth of it.

 

“Come now Lord Greyjoy you mustn’t tell me all your secrets,” she chides.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Important to point out that Robb is not a jerk just for the sake of being a jerk, bear in mind he was the one who saw the fallout of what happened to Sansa and also what transpired between his parents after. So he sees that wearing down of the once happy family as Sansa's fault, right or wrong because he was a kid when it happened. 
> 
> Arya of course has perhaps idolized Sansa a bit in her absence because she didn't have to grow up with a sister to annoy/be annoyed by. 
> 
> Bran is more or less levelheaded, I think, he's a very independent Stark, more a party of one.
> 
> And Rickon wasn't even born. 
> 
> One last note and that's it: Tagging.
> 
> If someone has a particular concern about tagging, if you have a concern before commenting on it read the AO3 FAQ and TOS on the subject if you have not already and you might be surprised as to what it says.
> 
> As always you can find me on tumblr as whatwouldflorencedo and glubefics if you have questions about content or potential triggers just ask, if that's too much work to put in then I've got no hard feeling towards someone who doesn't read my fic because they think it might trigger them, and I mean that with no sarcasm or douchebag intent.
> 
> I write some very heavy stuff, some very dark stuff.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Theon in this is more book Theon than show Theon

The day has settled into the bleakness of a rising dusk and House Umber, preoccupied with fortifying the Gift against the coming snow melt, have left the duty of greeting her to Karstark men who have remained since quelling the Bolton rebellion.

 

It makes little difference who has kept her castle for her but Harrion Karstark, having held it under a command from her father, looks glad that it has come time to relinquish it. The heir to Karhold stands among his men but steps forward to hold her mare’s reigns as she dismounts. He greets her with no spare words. “Lady Stark.” His northern burr is less thunder and more boy’s gentle grumble but it suits him.

 

“Lord Karstark.”

 

He only nods, as stoic as a stone. He is older than she but she stands just as tall.

 

Theon Greyjoy swings down from his horse, grinning widely. “Not dead yet, Harrion?”

 

For a moment the ice of the man cracks and beneath it she sees more of the boy left in him.

 

“Sad to see you’re still alive, Greyjoy," Harrion Karstark barks.

 

She smiles as they clasp arms and grin together.

 

Theon turns to look upon her. “He made it through the gate while there were still a few fighting men left, my lady.”

 

“And I thank him for it,” she tells them both.

 

The young Lord Karstark looks away and swallows but does not flush in the cold, he has glanced only once at her in the way all men do. “Rooms have been prepared for you,” he announces loudly, for the benefit of seeming unaffected in front of his men who shuffle in place around the yard, she's sure.

 

A groom leads their horses away and her own retinue seeps in around the edges of the grounds.

 

“Were you named castellan, Lord Karstark?” she asks as they sweep into the smoke blackened hall.

 

The soot from many scores of torches over the nights of many long years has stained the stone but there is no scent of fire or dampness, something else lingers, blood and the vented air from below the ground, a heat less clean than the springs of Winterfell.

 

Her words bring his eyes back upon her and her smile makes him forget that she is a woman much unlike others he has known.

 

“Yes, my lady.”

 

“We will speak further after we’ve supped.”

 

He looks grateful to have leave of her.

 

Theon Greyjoy watches him go and asks if he is meant to show her what he knows of the castle he’s helped to slaughter men in.

 

* * *

 

 

The Dreadfort is more than simple rival to Winterfell in size, it has heat in its stones and heralds her amazement as readily as her true home ever has.

 

It is monstrous in its scope and it’s a trying thing to look about and find nothing familiar, to discover everything undone in everything she might chance eyes upon.

 

The Dreadfort is _too_ large.

 

She knows she will yet need a castellan and her household will only just make it livable until her cousin comes from the Last Hearth with his own men and small household. Theon Greyjoy remarks upon rooms, walking beside her and showing her where he and the Karstarks, and later her brother Robb, came in the night to slaughter the bastard’s boys and his dogs.

 

It had been a quick skirmish, the moon had been dark and the men quiet.

 

She smiles as if he remarks upon roses in the garden of the Red Keep.

 

Her smile is a servile, changing thing that has become something better meant for men to glean how appreciated their service has been, than for petting the delicate pride of noble ladies who might have once taken pace beside her. She grins like she might have with Margaery, chancing upon some trysting pair hiding in the shade with breeches low and gown held high.

 

It is a smirk that the Lord Harrion slides a stare towards, furtive and unsure of just what she is, for surely he’s not seen a girl mimic such a grin better suited for a man’s mouth before.

 

The young Lord Karstark is just a boy, despite his size and how many years he has seen. It’s doubtless that he’s seen battle, after a fashion, but she doubts he’s ever found more than shyness or pleas to not be so bold from girls he might have tried to gather into his arms.

 

She looks again at the tall, broad wall of the young lord.

 

“We leave for the Last Hearth within the fortnight, we will meet my cousin and he will accompany me back to the Dreadfort but I will require men to travel north from there. Would you accompany us, Lord Harrion?”

 

“I was told by my father to provide whatever service you had need of.”

 

“I would not keep the heir to Karhold from his duty unduly, you have my leave until the morrow, go and tend to your men.”

 

He chances a look at Theon but says nothing of how it might be improper to leave her in the presence of a man who is only by courtesy not called hostage to his face and it is Maester Wolkan coming upon them that gives him the peace of mind to excuse himself from her presence. “My lady,” he says and then he is striding away down dark, half-lit halls.

 

Theon has become silent in the half-shadow of the hall, so quiet that one might forget he is there in the course of conversation with another.

 

The maester waits for her to address him.

 

“Maester Wolkan have you been looking for me?”

 

“Yes, I wished to speak with you for a moment, if I may, Lady Stark”

 

“Walk with us.”

 

The maester is as skittish as a ladies’ maid or new made septa who has lost their ward and must give such tidings to the mother of such an unruly charge.

 

They walk and the maester takes a fortifying breath before he speaks. “I thought you should like to know the state of our larders and stores, my lady.” Behind them both, as a kind of shadow slowly treading dust that has the gift of words Theon Greyjoy says in a voice not lacking in mirth: “Kind that they left it stocked for a siege.”

 

“Lord Bolton was always concerned about preparedness should an occasion arise," the maester remarks, shakily.

 

She cannot help but pin the man with a look if only to see if he will squirm or stand under her gaze. “You mean, should he decide to rebel against my father."

 

“My lady, I…-“

 

He squirms and so...she relents.

 

When she breaks gaze he exhales with the distinct air of relief about him.

 

She allows him his wordlessness and nervous disquietude, she raises a hand and her sleeve slips about her fine white wrist, Theon glances before he looks sharply away, trying to avoid such obvious interest.

 

“You have no control over what a lord you serve might do. Tell me the state of the other stores," she tells the maester, ever gracious in her forgiveness.

 

Theon laughs quietly to himself as the poor scared man regales her with unending inventories in gratitude.

 

* * *

 

 

She catches eyes all throughout the meal but no man yet stands brave enough to ask a dance of her or walk the half-pace and make some petition, offer her some story of valor or lend a song to the amusement and merriment of them all.

 

It is early yet, into the night and her northern pension. “I think my cousin took the bard north with him, are there any who might chance upon us a song?” she asks of the hall, her voice raised but not unpleasantly so.

 

A hush falls as men eye her from their larders before they begin to push and shove amongst themselves until at last a man might emerge who is known for his bawdiness or gruff tones that give way to something affording as talent or skill.

 

The Karstarks clamor for the Bear and the Maiden Fair, the knights from below the Neck favor The Dornishman’s Wife.

 

She rises after a third ballad is sung and the light of the torches begins to die, thinking to retire but finding that her feet have led her outside into the night and quiet of the empty yard instead of her sparse chambers.

 

She walks the steps and the walls where guards greet her solemnly.

 

The ranging shadow of a man whose face she need not see to know what expression it wears comes up from the stone stairs as she crosses to the end of one high wall. “I would think I'm something of an oddity here.” She smiles grimly when he wonders at her presence away from the feast.

 

“There are mistresses on Pyke,” he assures her as if it might assuage the tumult of her mind, as if that it all there is that creeps inside of it, a single, solitary worry about _mistresses_.

 

“You don’t call them that on Pyke,” she says.

 

He shrugs and looks up at the moon, it hangs at half its wondrous bounty. “Little difference.”

 

“A salt wife is still a kind of wife.”

 

He is quiet for so long a moment the she thinks she might have bested him with her words until he breaks his silence and speaks again.

 

“You don’t shock me, my lady.”

 

He offers her a wineskin and she takes a small swallow of the bitter vintage, glad it is not so sweet as some southern red.

 

“How many women of title are salt wives? Not many,” she chides.

 

“There are still lords here who will fuck another man’s woman and call it lord’s right. They’re not so noble up here.”

 

“And do you claim to be any different?”

 

He looks as if he weighs the very measure of himself, carefully and without shame before he answers her.

 

“I don’t know if I’m different but I do know I’d best only touch a woman I pay for. Safer that way.”

 

His face is so earnest she laughs softly.

 

“There’s something noble left in you yet, I think,” she tells him holding out her hand for his wineskin once more.

 

“Don’t tell anyone,” he pleads.

 

She passes back the skin and he laughs around a swallow.

 

* * *

 

Her cousin comes back from the Wall and she half expects him to wear frost in his beard, he rides into the Last Hearth wearing only an open cloak of black sable and a jerkin meant for warmer climes, the cold does not appear to be of his concerns.

 

His mouth is as grim as the rest of his face, frozen into the rigor of unamused broodiness that clings to him in perpetuity.

 

He talks of the Wall's maester and the Lord Commander with such awe and respect she might think it a dangerous thing to have him sent to such a place, but his father has already set duty to him and spoken at length of the consequences that might come from disobedience.

 

She’s heard tale of her cousin's respect for the Wildlings who have come down from the far North, seeking something of a peace with the realm, banded behind a kind of King of their own, they seek nothing more than an end to hostilities.

 

Opinions vary on how much weight should be placed upon such sincerity, of which it is much to soon to judge as simple truth or falseness.

 

There are other tales falling softly like snow upon her ears that she's heard tell of.

 

She pays them no mind for they are foolish, dangerous things to be whispered about.

 

_‘Dead wildling lover…’_

_‘Climbed the Wall, he did…’_

_‘Wouldn’t be the first time a King’s son joined the Watch.’_

 

 

* * *

 

The Umber’s feast them in hearty fashion and in place of the Karstarks' fine somberness they offer loudness met with a rough kind of graciousness.

 

She knows she is as accomplished as any whore, a girl who seems a woman. She is something that might make a man seem a boy.

 

It’s easy work, requiring little skill, but the Umbers seem to think her some fine craft of womanhood and song and something yet unnamed that might scare a man just enough to flavor their wariness into something that is sought out to be enjoyed.

 

The King’s son broods at her side. He eats well but does not dance or drink or sing.

 

The Karstark men remain only because it would otherwise seem rude to leave before they have taken of their Umber hosts some measure of hospitality. Meat and mead must be had, the hearth surrounded, and song sung, only then may they mount their horses and return home to family beds.

 

Harrion Karstark asks a dance of her and she does not miss the envy that blooms or the whispers that begin.

 

He is a fair enough dancer and his face, if not handsome, is as kind and strong as his hands and arms. He looks resolved as they turn about the floor that he will not look away from her eyes in discomfort for they are of a height and men must be more used to having a woman’s eyes look upon them from below.

 

She can admire his pride, bending and remaking itself into something that shows he is one who is without pettiness, above whispers and jibes, that he is one to remember his courtesies even if another thinks that perhaps she is not as deserving of them as others.

 

“Thank you, my lady. By your leave I return home.”

 

She smiles and allows him as much as she is invited to dance by others.

 

And, it is only as she might excuse herself for the night that her cousin comes from the half-pace to be given her hand to lead her in a southron dance that only they might know the steps of well enough to dance it.

 

“You have been practicing, my Lord," she credits him.

 

He does not smile. “My brother refuses to dance with Rhaenys, her septa is hard to refuse.”

 

“There is marked improvement.” They have not danced together in years but the compliment is no less sincere for it.

 

His scowl, if anything, has only deepened over the course of the long evening. He turns them quickly about the hall and leans close to speak softly to her.

 

“You will send Theon Greyjoy back to Winterfell once we have returned to the Dreadfort.”

 

She gazes beside them at the other pairs that dance around them.

 

“Oh? I had not thought him to stay.”

 

He is biting his at his cheek, an old habit his own tutors never broke him of.

 

“He has been as close as a maidservant to you. I’ve heard.”

 

She wonders which of his men, or hers, are concerned of such things as her honor. It rankles and sours her mood.

 

“I would have chosen a more complicated gown for the evening if I had known such a thing, he might have helped me dress.”

 

His hand tightens around hers and he turns them so harshly into a step that she almost stumbles.

 

“You are too bold and Karstark came to complain.”

_‘Ah, then,’_ she thinks, Karstark seemed a man interested and put-off in turns with her, disgust and lust waging a silent war on the front of his mouth and the battleground of his brow since they met in the courtyard of her keep.

 

“Young Lord Karstark is exceptional at doing two things at once, being both envious and offended of the whispers a woman’s presence might bring when men have nothing better to do than prattle like washerwomen.”

 

Her eyes catch upon her cousin's own. He looks cross with her, sadness lingering in the corners, it is a trait he shares with the father he hates.

 

“I don’t think you a slattern but you might do better than keeping the company of such a person as a Greyjoy hostage.”

 

Her own ire flares and she catches his toes with her heel as her skirts sweep across them.

 

“Perhaps if a maidservant had been left to attend me instead of taken in your own retinue we would not be having such words with each other. You’ve missed a step. Besides, it would make for more whispers if it were anyone but a member of my father’s household accompanying me through my own halls. Do you agree?”

 

“Yes.”

 

Albeit unwillingly, she thinks.

 

“I will speak to the young Lord Karstark,” he promises, an admonition for the man belayed by his tight tone.

 

“You need not. I believe he has already left the hall.”

 

* * *

 

“What might you say if someone thought you were suited for stewardship?”

 

It is an inane, fool thing to ask a man that has been called to question in the minds of some for his closeness to her already. And, even if she has not known him as a man, she enjoys his company and his rogue charm nonetheless. She has seen that it makes other men uncomfortable.

 

An easy friendship outside of a kind of bond they might be better accustom to is hard for many to understand and that confusion has led to a vague, veiled hostility.

 

Theon Greyjoy is not a Lord and she is not his lady. If anything, it might appear she has taken him for bedsport, or as some kind of mistress of her own.

 

It’s a spare, mad thought but she wonders what he might say if she told him there are some who say _he_ is better suited to be a salt wife than she.

 

Her lips twitch up to hide a wide smile.

 

“A castellan?”

 

He makes to seem like he truly ponders it for a moment before he answers her in full. “You would leave your brother with no one to tell him which foot goes in which boot? One might think you hate him.”

 

“I don’t hate him,” she says but there’s little inflection to her words, her voice wooden and her tone a hollow thing.

 

“There’s not enough hate in you,” he remarks.

 

There is no great care in her either.

 

“And you’re made of entirely too much,” she says to him, not unkindly.

 

“I might yet have a solution for you Lady Stark.” His body, lithe and well-formed takes up the path before her, his shoulder pressed against the shadows on the stones, neck arched in some curve of seduction she’s seen only on the boldest women, offering an invitation, his hair like spilled ink and night around his shoulders, he is no woman, though.

 

He would come to her bed if she asked. He might even keep it a secret.

 

She folds her arms, loosely, not unamused but reserved to their easy volley of ranging looks and soft movement.

 

“I can forgive your lack of manners only because you’ve been around my brother for so long.”

 

They are both courtiers of a certain sort.

 

He breaks gaze first and he rolls his shoulders flat to the wall, his body becomes a subtle arch and his eyes slide back towards her, rake her like coals in a grate. “I should still know better, I used to be a prince.”

 

She waves. “That hardly matters.”

 

And he looks, for a moment, as if he might apologize for some ungiven offence or undealt wound, he says nothing and she might respect him more for it.

 

It’s nothing she hasn’t thought herself in the quiet moments away from the ones who have made her life something of worth or something so derided.

“What useful words do you have for me?” she asks.

 

He tells her of others not far removed from the same whispers that might follow a man’s mistress or a rebel king’s hostage son.

 

“I know of a bastard that won’t have a home now that his father is dead." He shrugs loosely. "I _might_ have heard the whole sad tale of it.”

 

Suddenly another's voice is called up from the dead past of a long ago night. _‘ **‘Might’** is only false modesty.’ _

 

They are words she remembers that only bring half a grimace to her lips. She forgets again and continues her way down the dark hall, Theon Greyjoy follows as she has expected of him.

 

* * *

 

 She returns home with a second retinue and works at a furious pace to turn the castle towards something within the realm of welcoming semblance.

 

It is in the fortnight following her return that a betrothal has been agreed to, so says the raven that has preceded her kin. Her father and brother are coming, her cousin yet away, beyond the Wall with Brothers who have taken the black and Umbers for a second time.

 

When her father arrives with Robb they sup and they sleep and they ready themselves for the long ride home to Winterfell, her brother’s disdain no different than child’s pain and her father’s distance the only way he might survive meeting the ghost of a ghost. Her Aunt Lyanna had been only a girl once too and she knows how much it must hurt him now that she has returned, a reminder of all he has failed to protect.

 

She avoids her brother with equal enthusiasm as he to her but she seeks out and finds her father alone on the great hill overlooking the lands that are hers to serve and protect and rule. She wonders how she was ever deemed fit for such a thing.

 

Perhaps, she thinks, more has been expected of her than she is readily able to give.

 

She thinks of the capitol and of Margaery, of staying with their King late through the night, learning songs and great histories, the lives of great men. She took lessons with Rhaenys and sometimes Jaehaerys, she is no less of mind then they.

 

Her father’s shoulders look like they ache under the weight of command and his own age.

 

She wonders if her will bear the same heaviness in the winters that are still to come.

 

“I had wished to speak on something with you since I learned of it," she says to his back.

 

He is not surprised that she had come to find him.

 

“What?”

 

She stands beside him and stares out at the hills, brown and green and a craggy black.

 

“Lady Baratheon had just arrived in King’s Landing before my departure but we spoke. _She_ spoke, truly, of her husband’s natural children and how she wished to remove them from Storm's End. I have need of castellan here and Edric Storm would be suitable. And, there might still be a lowborn natural son, a journeyman already. The blacksmith here is quite old and I would not be against his presence within my household. I know their father was a great friend of yours and that you have spoken on occasion to Lady Florent but were unable to foster Edric Storm yourself on her behalf.”

 

“That would resolve much of the strife between Lady Cersei and Roberts’ brothers.”

 

“I will send a raven then.”

 

He smells of great pines and mastic sap as he pulls her to his embrace, the black fur of his collar tickling her cheeks and nose. She has missed him.

 

The memory of her father has always been a half-living thing, half-real, but it soothes her mind to know that she's lessened his own strife and started to mend the rent that guilt has left in him like a wound, forever pulling lifeblood from him.

 

She’s never wished to be the killing thing between his ribs, drawing blood and stealing breath but such is the way it has been for many years.

 

He seems to breathe easier, a soft smile and a chapped cold kiss to her crown, he nods and then he is walking from the hill, back to take place ahead of Robb in the column of men that will leave her small parcel of repayment for her well wrung girlhood.

 

She watches them go and her own unfounded envy of life that has gone on without her lingers in the rooms that they have passed through.

 

 

* * *

 

 

_“May I ask you something?”_

_“You might ask regardless, I think.” She remarks from the saddle._

_“You know me better than your brother now,” he tells her, as if they might be lovers._

_They could have been, but he will leave soon too and it will no longer matter and she will be no lonelier for the ignorance of his touch which would persist if ever she’d allowed or asked or begged for such things._

_“I would hope so.”_

_And his mouth might drop as much a man who pretends not to find surprise in anything may be surprised._

_“But ask me anyway,” she says before he may utter some smart retort._

_“They would never talk about you, and when they did, in the beginning, I was thinking of other things.”_

_“That’s not truly a question.”_

_“I’ve never heard the whole tale before, is all.”_

 

_She sighs._

_“My father came to see my Aunt Lyanna brought home. But, His Grace had already had a beautiful tomb built for her under the sept. My mother and I were called to court, Arya too but she was only a babe then. Then, your uncle rebelled and then when he died your father did not yet think it time to cede. My father was away from court for a very long time it seemed.”_

_“They all came home and you had cause to stay.”_

_“Yes.”_

_“And now you are home.”_

_“If you were to go to Pyke now, do you think you would still call it a home?”_

_He does not meet her eyes and she is the one who smiles, it is some kind of joke, some bitter and cruel jape, he feels badly for her but she can only feel amusement that men might feel any such thing when told of some sad thing but not while in the commission of the deed that would cause such pains._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Again the response to this has been amazing. Thanks for reading.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh, man. I know you guys came here for me to hurt you a little, here’s some angst. I’m digging the hole real deep on this one.

The spring that is spoken of in hopeful tones has begun to show what it might do.

 

Her time spent south of the Neck had helped make her indolent to the beauty of it, five years in King's Landing and she'd never wanted for sun it seemed but as the lands along the Weeping Water become more than the cold, mud banks of a northern river, it is apparent that she has changed too. The land has become the curve of some great serpent across the countryside, a twist of green.

 

It is the _becoming_ of something, a great change and thing of wonder that makes her feel as if she blooms with the rising of spring.

 

Soon, grain will grow again and the ewes will blissom to belt out the cries of their heat and the whole world will be something of song.

 

It is in her new and fragile happiness that she takes too great a comfort in her new place and position, and perhaps it is this that the gods, those of her father, duplicitous and tricksy, or her mother which long for opportunities to give lessons to those they judge wanting of some quality that only the penitent might have, have chosen to strike at.

 

A letter has come.

 

A letter has come from the King and her maester, unsure perhaps of her true command of station, comes to her near fearful weeping for his own. He tells her of the King’s seal and of his son questioning it.

 

She does not need to hear much more, she knows already what has occurred that leaves the maester so repentant that he is near to his knees in begging her pardon. She does not fault him for his fear, a Bolton would have skinned him or taken an eye for letting a letter be read by one to whom it had not been intended.

 

She considers the urge to have the man whipped in the yard but dismisses it as fancy and him as a fool, commands instead that none, not even a King’s bastard have right to her private correspondence.

 

“Will further discussion be needed?”

 

“No, my lady.”

 

* * *

 

He is a tempestuous boy, with nothing of his father or brother in him as he stands before her.

 

“What did he tell you to do?”

 

Her cousin has come to her solar unannounced and uninvited. She longs to send him away, her anger not without good cause, but she would not be beholden to such small emotions as that. She has said nothing and given her displeasure no voice.

 

The broken seal of his father has been cracked along a neat and tidy line and looking upon the winged folds atop the otherwise bare table she can hear the snap of cold wax all too easily and imagine it held in her cousin's hands, the words he has read.

 

She’d been waiting for them. There is a small betrayal in it, she thinks, such unkindness.  She has resolved to keep as cool a head as her Queen might have more than once had occasion to present despite a war of rage and pain smothering beneath the appearance of peace.

 

“In the letter? I don’t know. You’ve been the one to read it. It is not a mark of princely station to read and recite a lady’s correspondence while she breaks her fast. I should think that a job for my castellan or maester.”

 

He rounds the room like some trapped thing, running a hand through mussed hair in a childlike fashion, distress and anger in every bit of his stomp and the twitch of his glower. He stops to demand an answer from her. “What did he tell you to do?”

 

She sighs and stares emptily at the letter yet unread by her.

 

“To be a comfort to you.”

 

He scoffs.

 

She looks up sharply and glares, she wishes she might scoff too.

 

He returns the hateful look as if he might actually understand her own. She is still only just a woman, a servant of a King and beholden, as any other, to his wishes. He sounds truly petulant then. “He thinks to give me the mistress who has outgrown his desires. I do not share his talent for that I find.”

 

“I would not presume to think I know your father’s mind on a manner such as his desires.”

 

“I would say otherwise.”

 

She is too shaken in her indignation to answer his assertion as soon as it flies from his mouth, she can only incline her head and offer him some show of resignation and allowance that he is right, _'_ _o_ _f course',_ because his a King's son.

 

“As you say, my lord. Perhaps I do not understand.”

 

He waves and she rises from her seat to cross the room, intent in subservience to make a show of placating him, she arranges the cups on the sideboard, and pours him a measure of ale.

 

He folds his restless limbs into a chair. He looks haggard like a man with far too many cares.

 

“No. You do not. I cannot simply replace one woman with another as he replaces his girls.” He takes the cup from her outstretched hand as if confused by its purpose, he’s stalled for words she has not yet had time to think on properly.

 

His spite, it seems, has curled up and been burned away in the heat of his poor mood.

 

She smiles for a brief moment. He looks some measure of mollified as he drinks deep of the ale.

 

Somehow, she loses her smile to the chill in the room and becomes someone else, a northen woman, a lady of her own title, settled on her own lands. “You will no longer be welcome at the Dreadfort should you think to break the seal of my private letters again. I do not wish to write your father of this. I may not refuse his wishes but I might refuse his natural son, though he has recognized you as his own.”

 

The turn of his mouth, parting in dark mirth, would be something of beauty if it were not so detestable, he nods towards her table, at the letter from his father.

 

“It says to tell me not to overburden you. You might consider me told.”

 

He hands her the cup and leaves her to her letters.

 

* * *

 

Edric Storm has taken well to the sword. He is far from novice but he is still too rangy to bring to bear a proper blow to another combatant.

 

She watches on her way across the walk to her meeting chambers.

 

His bastard brother is broader but Edric is taller.

 

He might be an able squire but it will be a number of years yet before he is suited for the listings of a tourney.

 

“Drop your arm again and I’ll ring your head like a bell," she hears her cousin tell him.

 

They meet with practice steel again and the yard chimes with the sound, a twin to the strike of hammer upon anvil within the forge.

 

Her household is slow to task in the wake of warmer days but she finds there is much to hope for and no reason that she should not be granted such favor by whichever gods tug the cords of her life. 

 

* * *

 

 

She has a very fine red silk from Lys that she uses on the tunic, hoping it will help to stitch some measure of civility back between herself and Jaehaerys.

 

He seems unused to kindness but perhaps he is more a man than she had considered before.

 

A man with the problems of men, not the boy he used to be. To think she knows all of his troubles or all of what might pain him would make her a true fool. She had been cross, now she is only mercifully emptied of such feelings.

 

To let go of such things that others hold onto is a talent she possesses now having learned from others for when she would want to weep or scream.

 

_'Let them be the ones to fill you up.'_

 

* * *

 

There are many complaints and many who have grievances that will not go unheard. Her lands are vast now and so it seems her concerns also.

 

Within one sennight there have been three disputes over livestock.

 

Who truly would own the calf if it's parentage stretches from one man's parcel of land into another's? It is a more difficult question than she's even given merit before.

 

There are two houses inquiring as to the size of her household, if she has intentions to aide in the placement of such lost or inconvenient reminders of old wounds upon the heart or the causes of household strife, such inconveniences with the surname Snow.

 

Lord Halys Hornwood has come with both his sons, the heir and the bastard.

 

Larence Snow has only just seen a name day that makes him three and ten but she relents, inclining a head towards her cousin who has no squire of his own yet, a small thing that is not of small consequence to many.

 

And, for all his recent wroth he says nothing, only nods. Jaehaerys is no fool, he understands that he must have a squire and that a northern son, natural or not, goes far in maintaining the careful balance of civility across the realm.

 

Wendel Manderly comes to offer congratulations on her appointment as Lady of Dreadfort in respect for her father.

 

Lord Manderly's second son is not quite a fat as him but more nearly bald, he is pleasant enough but cannot seem to part his gaze from her bosom, he asks her if she is in need of more chambermaids for he has two nieces that might learn something of graciousness and the importance of burning less bright then the men around them from tending to a lady he won't ever actually call by the title he believes she deserves.

 

Then, there are concerns over flooding as the northern ice on the weeping river melts more and more with each day.

 

She endures the tedious nature of the day with as much placidity she can manage.

 

Her bottom is sore and her back aches from sitting so long in her horrifically carved chair by the time the room has emptied.

 

* * *

 

 

His is in the library when she finally finds him.

 

“Come," she says once he has looked up to acknowledge that she has indeed found him. He only just peers up at her from his book of histories.

 

“Why?”

 

“I have made you a tunic. I would like to see the fit of it so I might make correction.”

 

It is jarring how alike their words and posture are to something she has seen between septa and charge. He looks the boy, hunched over an old book and her the stern, tall shadow in the way of his light. She steps back and he shuts his book regardless.

 

“I did not ask you to make me a tunic.” His beleaguered expression looks laborious for his face to endure.

 

“It is a gift.”

 

“…”

 

She sighs. “I do not want discord and strife between us." It is only the pair of them on the edge of the room where the lives of great men have been set to paper in ink and bound, only to be shelved and misquoted.

 

"I have loved your father much differently and deeper than my own family, and I think at times perhaps he has loved me too, in his own way."

 

He does not interrupt her, only waits for what she might yet say. It's easy to find the words she wants when he is not so hateful in how he looks upon her.

 

"I would do whatever he would ask of me. But know that he did not ask me to beguile you or put myself into your bed. He knows you are far from home and does not wish you to be lonely or cold. I’m sorry if some part of my manner led you to believe I had bold intentions towards your person, it has not been my purpose. I have been unkind to you, and a poor host because of my own strife. I beg pardon, Lord Jaehaerys.”

 

Her formal curtsy is low, and he clears his throat of its harsh tones.  “There’s nothing to forgive. I forget that there’s much you can do nothing about.”

 

The words carve into her with unexpected sharpness, she does not believe it his intention but it hurts her all that same.

  

* * *

 

He has received a letter.

 

A black seal from farther north.

 

The Wall, it seems, has not yet finished tempting Jaehaerys Waters. 

 

The men that are his own are called to emerge from their quarters late in the evening.

 

Before the rains begin they will go to the Gift and then to the Wall.

 

He does not tell her the why of it and neither does she ask.

* * *

 

 

He has called her to his chambers.

 

They have supped plainly in the hall and while the hour is not yet late it would be otherwise inappropriate to call upon a lady at such a time of night, in most circumstance, but she is never to be a common kind of lady.

 

Edric Storm looks discomfited by having been sent to knock upon her door. She dresses simply from her night shift and does not plait her hair again, only pins it so it might not spill from her nape so easily.

 

It is clear her cousin is much in his cups for he does not rise to open his chamber door, nor greet her properly, there is only a staunch command to enter upon her solitary knock.

 

“You had need of me, my lord?” she wonders how alike he is to other men, and how much of her King's blood is truly in him.

 

If he were a Dragon now would be when he has what he wants of her, if he wants at all. The understanding rings hollowly through her.

 

The room is not cold but it is far from warmth and he is looking at the fire in the grate, then out upon the night from the open window, his eloquence seems spent upon a grunt. “How would you comfort me?”

 

She has only known one man but she is well learned in what women are wanted for.

 

_'Start softly, a suggestion of time and how it might be spent.'_

 

Margaery has never had to ply men with wine or lurid displays to make them fall out of their breeches.  In fact, she's sure that Margaery's only even poured her wine with unsaid intention in it.

 

“I might play the harp for you, if you like but I can play cyvesse, if you'd prefer,” she answers.

 

Her steps are well-measured, her pins are all loose and her hair has started to fall.

 

His head lolls against the high back of his chair, the ink of his curls shining in the firelight. “What is a King’s Mistress taught after she has mastered the harp and cyvesse and has seen all the roses in that fucking garden of his?”

 

_'You give them a gift they could never return, nor admit that they want, to prove that you do not play them false you tell them what you think they are. What they want to be.'_

 

“I do know other games, my Lord.”

 

He shifts roughly in his seat when she calls him such.

 

“Games?”

 

She sits upon the ground between his legs and his eyes, black as pitch roam the column of her throat the looseness of the bodice that displays the softness of her breasts, she can smell the leather of his jerkin and the rise of his baser self. She asks a song of him and suddenly he is disgusted with his own lust and her own vicious joy is soured by her bitterness.

 

She is beautiful, but she is a woman grown. He is a Dragon, but he is named Waters.

 

He rises and steps around her, at the window he stands as dark as a summer storm on the horizon.

 

His father had loved her once when she’d been only a doll, in the cold the truth is not so hidden and there are no flowers that grow so far North to hide the rot of dead things found beneath the snows.

 

“They treat you like a whore and me like a bastard,” he spits.

 

“Please, don’t be cruel.” Her voice is plain and without the true feeling to imbue her words with sentiment or the hurt he seems ever eager to wrench from her.

 

“You know what they call you, here, in King’s Landing. Does it matter?”

 

“It does not matter, they know nothing.”

 

He turns from the window so furiously she thinks at first that he means to strike her for some unintended offense, it fades quickly, the fire in his eyes and he looks only pained a moment later.

 

“Nothing?” he scoffs. “They know the _truth_. Bastard and whore and we all belong to him, we might be nothing to _him_.”

 

She does not know where her words come from, some wound inside of her perhaps, raked open by his rending teeth.

 

“But who is worse?" she asks him. "You who is spiteful for all his love or myself who is happy to think that the lie of his love is truth itself? I am no fool, my lord. We are all many roles, and then we are more than just that, too.”

 

“Aren’t you though? A perfect fool. You are, you know? He only sent you to be a _comfort_ to me because you’re kissed by fire.”

 

He turns from her and pulls hands from the wild tangle of his hair, aggrieved and wretched.

 

“I don’t know what that means," she tells him.

 

“You have red hair.”

 

What they might yet say is lost, the wind slams the open pane against the stones, the gust so forceful the glass cracks neatly in a ruinous curve. It stalls him and startles her.

 

She is gone before he might go on.

 

* * *

There are men who have come north with him that he barely deigns to look at. They seem not to mind it.

 

In fact they seem to welcome it as a beaten dog welcomes the boot that they have come to know as their master.

 

Jaime Lannister looks sallow and tired, he has seen the worst of her cousin’s wordless vehemence.

 

It's hard to garner just what the man’s fault has been.

 

* * *

 

He is out in the hills sitting atop his horse, she brings her mare along side and stares out on the rolling earth. “Your father does not see you as a bastard. You should not doubt his love for you.” She tells him. “And, he loved your mother.”

 

His expression does not change, the mask he wears turns to face her.

 

“My mother was a little girl he raped hundreds of times. Over and over again until she was old enough for his seed to take.” He grins then, wryly and to the distance as he looks away from her. “She wanted to dash me against the stones but she was too weak to stop my nurse from taking me to my cradle.”

 

It is nothing she has not already heard others speak, never so louder, of course, never so completely, nor gleefully. He pulls his destrier to block her mare from turning so he might go on. “And after _poor_ Lyanna Stark was dead there was the Tyrell girl. But, she’s barren, they say.”

 

He seems intent to make her own mask crack like the pane of glass in his casement.She is not angry, she feels nothing.

 

“You’re different,” he tells her, very surely. “Maybe it's because you don’t really see him at all.”

 

She longs to strike him. She doesn’t.

 

Her eyes are wet and she bows her head not knowing why they would be. The only words she might say are not the ones he expects.

 

“She is not barren.”

 

“What?”

 

She looks up upon his confusion, sniffs lightly in the cool air of the young spring. “Lady Olenna had terms. Moon tea and coin and Margaery would be a royal mistress for no longer than four years after her flowering and have a dispensation to be named the heir to Highgarden should her brother Willas be without issue. He's a cripple, you see. ”

 

He is pale with something she is not sure is anger.

 

“Everything they say you are, he made you that.”

 

She pulls her mare away and begins to turn back towards the keep. She does not look at him as she speaks. 

 

“What difference does it make, my lord? All women are girls who men make into the things they want of them.”

 

“…”

 

“Will you dine in the hall tonight, cousin?”

 

Now, he does not answer, his mask returned.

 

She rides away.

* * *

 

They break fast at the high table. 

 

“I am going North, to the Wall, in two days time. Keep my household in order, I will have no need of it at the Wall.”

 

It is the first time he will travel without his own cook and hounds and larger company, she wonders if he will try to take the Black as the rumors say he’s already tried once.

 

_'They all wish to be balanced on the edge of their own wanting, meekness and compliance, vigor and boldness.'_

 

She is the picture of compliance.

 

“Yes, my lord.”

 

“Your smith will come too, for as long as it takes for him to show the new southron way of forging to the Builders.”

 

“Very well.”

 

To take the Black is no insignificant thing. She wonders if he would truly try such a thing for perhaps the second time.

 

From across the hall Jaime Lannister looks as if he has not seen a bed in days.

 

Her cousin only smirks at him.

 

She finds she has a sour stomach for all his mummery of late, she retires to her solar and Edric Dayne assists in the answering of her letters, she asks aloud if he knows the cause of such apparent resentment between the two men.

 

His voice falls to a hush though they are the only ones in the room.

 

“Ser Jaime, I’ve heard, wrote letters to the King of what his lord was doing beyond the Wall. And, they said Lord Jaehaerys took a Wildling girl for a lover. That she died and he wanted to take the Black and that the King sent men to escort him below the Neck.”

 

She knows the rumors are not all unfounded.

 

“They say he took vows but…”

 

She knows the rumors that near to none would even dare to whisper into the wind. “But the King offered a hundred men in his stead,” she supplies.

 

Edric Storm nods.

 

She breaks the green seal of roses on the next letter in the stack. “If any man repeats any part of that tale you will take him to be flogged in the yard. Do you understand Edric?”

 

The boy pales but offers no complaint.

 

“Yes, my lady.”

 

She wonders how such plain loathing on her cousin's face must weigh upon the man pledged to protect him.

 

It is no simple thing to protect another, one must always risk another's ire.

 

Her cousin has not been wrong to say that they all belong to his father, it is his kingdom in which they reside, it is his heart where they are kept, wanted or no.

 

She turns eyes to her letter. The familiar curls of writing fill her with a kind of anxious warmth that is not simply welcomed of not. 

 

' _Dearest Sansa, How are you faring?'_  

 


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A letter from Margaery is slipped in throughout this chapter.

' _Dearest Sansa, how are you faring?'_

 

The keep is quiet, spring has come in full and like the beasts that grunt inside their pens and from the hills she wonders if she might find some lover, too.

 

The quiet allows her to take stock of the faces and forms of men.

 

Theon might stay for days or arrive at night, he would laugh and he would gleam, pale and long across her bed with the same hungry mouth as the Stark he might have been named for and Harrion would allow her to touch him boldly if only he were sure they were alone, she would have need to find some lonely, lost place where he might abandon what he believes them both to be.

 

There are steps in the hall, some restless wanderer makes his way. She knows who it is, poor homesick boy.

 

Edric is a stag, a small one still, more boy than man and she suspects she is too much trained in acts that men might put upon girls to put him in the kind of ease that might help him become a man.

 

There is a letter perched upon pillow, against the bedstead, the finely penned words are deep pressed and Aegon she imagines, finely arranged in her old chambers in southern rooms, waiting and expectant with something furious lurking in his lust, he is made of a dornish snakes venom and dragon’s blood.

 

There is something with the taste of cold in the night air that makes her think of where winter will always persist.

 

She thinks on a cold so deep that a man might never get warm, all men except Jaehaerys who does not feel it.

 

His beard would burn her skin and his touch might bruise her in his unrepentant hate of who has touched her first and as of yet, finally.

 

_‘They still speak of you here, it is as if Winter Has Come for how somber this court feels without your presence in it.’_

 

* * *

 

 

There have always been those who say that the Margaery looks like the late Lady Lyanna, it would be harder to say there be _no_ resemblance. It is hardly unusual for a man to seek his dead lover in the comely faces that yet remain rosy with their youth and their vitality.

 

_‘The girl is pretty, she has her mother’s looks but none of the callous heart.’_

Indeed, she can imagine well that Myrcella must indeed look near enough to her mother at ten.

 

Once, it was Cersei Lannister who might have stood at Elia Martell’s place in the Great Sept of Baelor and there was a time when Lord Tywin resided upon Casterly Rock and readied his castle for a royal party.

 

Her King was only then a Prince, not much beyond her own age now and the Lady Cersei had only just been older than her daughter.

 

And, by the time the Royal Party had left Aerys was in greater spirits with Rhaegar steeped deep in a black mood and Cersei Lannister whispered of as _spoiled_ by a careless prince.

 

They say Aerys had laughed upon his return to King’s Landing.

 

In was considered, as she is told, in bad taste that Aerys would laud the deflowering of the lord’s young daughter by the prince, but it had been an easy enough thing to end a betroythal that would have given one house greater power than is best to allow.

 

Rhaegar was betrothed to Elia Martell and Lord Tywin was named Hand of King, a gesture of goodwill and peace.

 

It seems now the Lady Cersei Baratheon has come to collect her due.

 

Once, King Aerys sent Tywin Lannister the weight of his daughter and first son in gold for a name-day gift.

 

What is the price of a girls’ maidenhead, or her daughter’s?

 

She wonders carelessly of how much more noble a son is to a father who has been considered the worst of kings.

 

_‘Your presence is much missed here.’_

 

She wonders herself if she is the progenitor to some future nameless girl or if she is the second incarnation of another she might never know the truth of.

 

* * *

 

 

His white cloak is soap grey from the long journey into the North. She saw him south with a long loose wave of blonde hair and a perpetual smile.

 

Rhaegar was a better King that Aerys and Jaime Lannister never had to regret the oaths he’s sworn.

 

Now, he is roughhewn and undone by the sharpness of his charge’s scorn.

 

“Ser Jaime.”

 

He turns to her; the shadow of his unshaven cheek darkens by the day.

 

“Lady Stark.” He looks, always, above her head, never at her face or her eyes or even her breasts. He looks away whenever she turns to glance in his direction.

 

“I have seen you training with Edric Storm, how is his arm?”

 

“Stronger each day it seems.”

 

He does not smile as his words would allow.

 

She attempts to pass some more meaningful words between herself and the man who might offer some careful kind of truth regarding her cousin to her. “I met your sister,” she begins.

 

His smile is small, beleaguered even with the half-measure of mirth in it. “I had thought you might.”

 

“Does she remain at court?” she asks.

 

“For now, she does.”

 

He walks beside her and she nods.

 

“That is good then.”

 

“I would hope it is.”

 

It is clear the man fears for his small niece. It is a difficult thing to be unable to say or to do much, it is little wonder why it is this man of the Kingsguard that has been sent so far from his King.

 

_‘A lack in kindness has been revealed with your departure, in your place no one has come to show such gentle compassion.’_

 

“Would you sup at the hightable tonight?”

 

“I do not think it wise, my Lady,” his frown etches deeply into the lines around his eyes.

 

She waves away his soft refusal, stepping before him, hands clasped within then long sleeves of her gown. “You are a knight of the Kingsguard and you might do more than remain in the back of the hall as some spectre.”

 

He smiles like a small crack forms before the façade crumbles.

 

He has always been a spectre standing outside of doors and perhaps that is why he’s never looked at her after her first exit from the King’s bedchamber, a bright morning when she’d looked up, hateful and sore and he’d looked down, before the façade had risen, before he understood anything of _good_ Kings.

 

* * *

 

 

Once she was not just herself but three upon a bed, between her only lovers, for once it had been the King and his Margaery and she.

 

She dreams of half-remembered things, softness and a longing fraught with tenderness and uneasy pleasure.

 

She had been a girl unflowered and it had been a heady thing to seem so wanted, to have been so desired had been a tumult and a storm and she had moved uneasily, tossed upon ardent hands and made to keen, cry out and tumble upon reclined limbs, the soft rise of breasts and the planes of a man she finds in the features of another’s brooding face.

 

It troubles her to think of their smiling faces cast open to wear wide amazement or gentle pleasure.

 

She rises from her bed now, not for the first time over many nights. She finds the past has made her restless again.

 

_'I find myself walking often in the gardens.'_

 

* * *

 

 

She reads and fills in the blanks of time that pile around her.

 

There is no lack of things to do but the roughened company of northern peoples is not easy to acclimate herself to, harder still to emulate. She learns slowly the ways in which to appear less the distant mistress of a man they call king but will likely never chance to see with their own eyes.

 

She becomes again the Daughter of Eddard Stark, Warden of the North.

 

_'I expect the company of northern lords is more easily endured now that it grows warmer.'_

 

Her household is as derided as she, the servile remnants of a cruel, dead house. There are rooms in the keep she has gone into and comes sick from, rooms stained by the black deeds of beasts who were men.

 

A collection of torn womens’ gown, braids of hair cut free, a cloud of vicious enjoyment that lingers there.

 

Her cousin’s wolf had come from the wood with the bone of a woman in his jaws.

 

Things have happened within her keep that leave the dead wandering in its halls, voiceless and blind, leaving an uneasiness behind them.

 

_'Is it wrong that I think of them as simpler creatures than these southron lords?'_

 

* * *

 

 

Her cousin returns from the wall and he is once again some dark thing in her halls, in the yard, though he softens amongst the boys that have trained in the yard, he all but grins in the midst of his wilding brood, hardened men taken to his command like brothers to their father’s firstborn son.

 

The days drift.

 

They sup together and find each other in familiar places around the castle.

 

They are simply more used to one another, it has not made things particularly simple or nice, it only means they no longer take such startling offense at what the other might say in jest or with true venom.

 

“Do you drink because you do not like to sleep?” she asks him as the hours grow later and he continues to drink, he is on his third cup.

 

He peers down upon his ale, it is not the night that makes him so bibulous she suspects, but other things like letters or dead lovers.

 

“You barely take any, do you dislike the taste? I imagine they gave you many cups when you began as his mistress.”

 

He asks her with a look she cannot place on his pale face, it isn’t concern, it might be some kind of jesting.

 

“He was very kind to me,” she says, he does not look like he wishes to hear much more of the topic. “He made great pains not to hurt or frighten me. I was, at first, but I don’t know if that would have been different had I been older or it been anyone else.” Her cousin has set down his cup and risen to stand at the hearth.

 

They are the only two in one of the smaller guest halls, her two ladies, the charwoman and her chambermaid, have been absent for a time, their embroidery left in baskets beside their empty chairs.

 

“Must you hate him?” she asks.

 

“He is not a good man.” There is fire in his voice, he places a fresh log to the flames.

 

_'His Grace has been renewed with the promise of a long Summer.'_

 

She swallows a mouthful of bitter wine, her voice toneless and not quite her own at all. “He’s not a man,” she tells him, he turns to look down at her. “He is your King. He is a Dragon,” she tells him to his face as others would never chance to do.

 

He smiles then, sitting again and leaning close to collect his own ale so he might mockingly bring their cups together. “He’s the Black Dread come again.”

 

He leans back into his creaking chair, boots out before him and slouched low, near drunkenness.

 

She is scowling, the wine has made it easy. In the night, they speak the truth to each other, some kind of the truth. “He is not so terrible as that. And, your opinion of him is unshared.”

 

He snorts softly to himself, into his cup. “I’m sure his bed brought you only pleasure.”

 

“More pleasure than distress,” she counters.

 

He looks at her like other men do, looking at her face and her body boldly. His gaze settles upon her hair for a long hard moment. She looks away from him. “You don’t lie half as well as you think you do,” he tells her.

 

* * *

 

Jaime Lannister looks aggrieved as she hands him the letter. A lion pressed in the red of the wax stares up from his hands.

 

She considers his dark expression. “It is good to have a brother and sister who both write, is it not?” It’s a question that does not need asking.

 

He tries to smile but she knows the meaning of it well and the ache that accompanies it.

 

She smiles gently upon him and incline her head. “Though, perhaps not always, I think.” She shares the misfortune of an unpleasant sibling.

 

“My brother wishes to visit the Wall, I think.”

 

She laughs. “Truly?”

 

The smile on the knight’s face wanes. “My brother would ask your permission to write to you, to formerly request shelter in your halls during his journey.”

 

She steps back to allow him space by her side as she begins to walk. “He may.”

 

He doesn’t match her steps.

 

“If I might, my lady?”

 

She stops and glances back at him. “Was there something else your brother writes to you about, Ser Jaime?”

 

“I believe he might wish to court you.”

 

The idea fills her only with unsettling interest, she is a certain kind of prize still, her lands have only made her name more known. “Did he?”

 

“He is the Lord of Casterly Rock,” Ser Jaime tells her as if he seeks to impress her, or remind her.

 

“I know who Lord Tyrion is, Ser Jaime,” she reminds him lightly.

 

His grin is tight, he nods to show some kind of deference or admit he has forgotten she is more than just a simple girl. “Of course you do, my lady. He seeks a bride, I would not doubt my father investiture some requirement of it upon his death.”

 

“So, it would be a favorable answer to a proposal he might seek if he comes north to ‘visit the Wall’?”

 

“I do not like to guess at the motives of lords.”

 

“I doubt that,” she says. “Why are you telling me this?”

 

He sighs and offers her his arm to walk down the dark halls on. “Plainly, I think you are well free of court.”

 

“Am I?”

 

_'You are well missed by many admirers.'_

 

“…”

 

“You have not answered my question, Ser. Why tell me of your brother’s intentions?”

 

“I know you tried to keep Myrcella from court.”

 

The cold coils in her guts like an unfavorable wind has blown. She remembers what she said, she remembers all the discussion on the topic. It is unpleasant to think on.

 

“I suggested a favorable betrothal when asked for my council on such a thing by His Highness Prince Oberyn. I did not think my views on the matter were inappropiate.”

 

“You were in favor, I believe, of sending my niece to Dorne.”

 

She stops to look up at him, he does not look down. “And, your sister was vehement that Dorne was too far.”

 

“King’s Landing seems very far now.” A sullen air lingers about the words.

 

“I’m sorry more favorable arrangements could not be made, surely Lady Myrcella is happy?”

 

His mouth puckers. They have almost come to the hall where her chambers reside.

 

“You tried. That’s more than anyone else might have. That’s why I’m telling you of my brother.”

 

He strides away, fast and sure but her mood has already soured.

 

* * *

 

There are secrets still to find in the bowels the Dreadfort in places where the terror of Red Kings lingers. She does not sleep well and awakens at night to walk the halls to find the skins of dead winter kings who bear the name of her father.

 

Something moves, a patch of unmelted snow and she wonders if in its red eyes there is something that has lived in the dark, it is silent and she is sure she must dream.

 

It is a beast in her halls and all at once she is quite aware of it as a real thing.

 

“Ghost, to me.”

 

She turns, thinking someone must speak to her but the wolf moves itself to its master and she knows it for its name.

 

“I could not find rest,” she admits to the shadow of the man returned from the Wall.

 

_'His Grace has announced a departure from court.'_

 

He is dressed for day still, he wears only black and the wildlings that hold his council call him Crow for it sometimes and laugh when some northern lord might correct them and call him Dragon.

 

 _‘His peckers too small for that.’_ She remembers having been said by a man with hair like wild flame.

 

He had laughed too.

 

He does not look like a man who laughs now. “I was unkind with my words, before.”

 

His sudden earnestness is a surprise.

 

“You were,” she says as if assuring him of a fact.

 

He bristles and his wolf licks its haunches and rests upon its forelegs.

 

“Is he hungry?” she asks.

 

He looks down at his silent companion. “He can hunt his own food.”

 

His eyes flick up again to meet hers, they are like the glass eyes of some doll, empty of something that should be there, something he’s never had at all, even when he laughs or when he spars, she wonders if the same blankness lingers when he moves on top a woman, inside of her, behind her.

 

“Still,” she says. “There’s lamb in the kitchens, it’s old, I don’t think it would do for supper tomorrow. You may give it to your beast.”

 

“He is from beyond the Wall.”

 

“So are you it would look.” She takes measure of his clothes in such a way that he might take notice of. “Do you leave again?”

 

The wolf rises, jaws opening wide on a yawn.

 

“Soon.”

 

He looks as if he might then ask some question of her, looking down towards her unshod feet, at the sweep of her nightrail below her heavy bedgown over her ankles.She answers him before he might with a bowed head.

 

“Good journey then, my lord.”

 

She thinks of him in his cold rooms at the Wall. She twists in the bed clothes and hand between her legs, fingers sliding through her slick. His sullen mouth and his stone eyes are there in the dark, a dark dream.

 

* * *

 

 

The black smith is shoeing the horses as she arrives in the yard, she moves where he might see her but it takes more than a moment for him to notice her presence in the forge.

 

“Milady.”

 

His eyes keep themselves low once he seen who she is.

 

“Gendry, isn’t it?”

 

“Yes,” he gazes up and his uneasy smile twists into a grimace, unsure of how to speak to her, she imagines.

 

“Do you like it here?”

 

“I think, milady, it is a good place for me to be. Thank you, milady.”

 

“Did Lady Cersei find you this polite, Gendry?”

 

She only means to tease but he blanches like she’s said something terrible enough to put fear into him.

 

“I don’t think she liked my being around, but my father was-,” he stops and swallows. He looks away and then up at the hot mouth of the forge, his jaw hardens. “She was kind to let me remain so long after his death.”

 

She quiets her easy manner, it has made him uncomfortable, he is used to women who use false kindness to wound a man, to poison his bones and make him sick of himself.

 

“You are doing good work Gendry, I am sorry that you lost your home when you lost your father.”

 

She does not smile, smiles seem to cow him.

 

He meets her eyes, breathing sharply through his nose, staring back at his hammer and his lips press into a thin white line.

 

“Never bothered me much leaving, he said I was his son, that’s all.” He has turned to iron to hide a weakness, to not soften before her.

 

She nods heavily, once, and tells him to continue with his work.

 

“You sup in the hall.” It is a command.

 

“I don’t want treatment like that just because my father was a friend of yours milady, wouldn’t be right to take your charity.”

 

“You are part of my household, I invited you here as a guest who might stay prolongedly, as long as you like, guests do not eat beside stable muck.”

 

He has the good sense not to refuse.

 

_'His Grace has accepted Lady Cersei's request to leave court and return home.'_

 

* * *

 

 

When the white raven flies to herald the true end of Winter there is excitement.

 

When an announcement arrives there is joy.

 

_'Myrcella yet resides in the Maidenvault. She is a sweet girl with none of the harshness one might find here without much searching.'_

 

She sits down to pen a letter to her cousin at castle black under commands of her own.

 

She does not doubt how poorly it will be received.

 

It matters not.

 

* * *

 

 

Maester Wolkan feeds the birds in the rookery. He offers a watery smile as she enters and offers her the letters that have arrived.

 

Arya’s scrawl is unfamilar and slanted but the words make her smile, it is a welcome thing. She talks little of their siblings, not much more of their mother and father.

 

Theon Greyjoy is mentioned to be pining over her.

 

She smiles and laughs.

 

In the arch of the sagging entry her cousin’s dark expression is unwelcome in the sharp, bright morning of the day, he is unpleased by his own return, it had not been a wish of his own, rather a command.

 

She thanks the maester and inclines her head to her cousin.

 

“Walk with me, my lord?”

 

He shakes his head, slowly, uncrossing his arms and walking from her presence in such a manner that she wonders if she is intended to follow.

 

She fails to know his true heart, if he has such motives at all, what he seeks and what he wishes continue to be dark, shifting things.

 

He does not wear the look of a man who is awaiting his own kin’s arrival.

 

_'It is hard to say who misses your presence most here.'_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A very small mini mystery that book readers might pick up on is in here, it will get mentioned later but it'd be cool to see if someone notices it now.
> 
> The Royal Party did indeed visit Lannisport when Cersei and Jaime were ten, Rhaegar would have been seventeen, in book canon. And the bit about weights in gold is canon too.


	6. Chapter 6

The strangeness of his arrival is that it is so small an affair, but then she knows it is only because he is the son that might refuse to his father’s face a grand party of riders.

 

It is only that Aegon is the son who will still stand before his father and face him without being called, without being commanded.

 

It is only that Aegon has always been left to do as he’s pleased.

 

He smiles widely on her and her household, her dark castle and his own forlorn natural brother.

 

“My lady,” he greets.

 

“Your Highness.”

 

He inclines his head at her low curtsy and looks very much as if it is his due and even that she has missed.

 

There is a difference in him that speaks to how favorable he is looked upon, most who offer their respect do so because they wish too, not because they must. Aegon is well loved.

 

Jaehaerys Waters bows formally before his brother, the heir to the Iron Throne and for once does not look bitter for the ceremony that has taken time from him, he only looks blankly ahead of him.

 

Aegon laughs and calls him curdled, pushing him back a step and clasping him tightly about the shoulders until there is no choice but for his darkly stoic brother to return the enthusiasm.

 

“You should cut your hair, you look like a girl," she hears said, for she is close enough to listen. The prince is unperturbed.

 

“You should shave, you look like Lady Sansa’s father.”

 

She thinks it fortunate that her cousin does not offer a retort as to how much Aegon looks like their own.

 

“Lady Sansa have you met Lord Tyrion?” Aegon Targaryen asks, grinning like only the realm's future king might.

* * *

 

The silver spill of his unbound hair is the mess of stolen sleep and a sprawl across an unmade bed.

 

He looks ill put together, unshod and open collared but awake, though blearily so. He’d never slept well and he’s never taken easily to his bed nor rose willingly from it.

 

She doesn't think she has seen a man so mussed before, only a boy perhaps.

 

They have both grown and it is not without its strangeness.

 

His smile is not his father’s, it lacks the solemn self-assurance of a king but is weighted by the expectation of a prince as good nature and wicked humor runs in Aegon like twin rivers. His brother holds something similar inside himself, the stifled twin pillars of fire, coiled around hot rage and smoldering ire.

 

And, all three share the same mouth she remembers. A set of lips she has kissed on three unlike men. She looks away from something that heats her with a longing for something not completely made of shame.

 

“You wished to be woken for supper, Your Highness.”

 

He lifts himself one shoulder at a time before he raises her head properly and turns his face to her again.

 

“Might I just sup here?" He sags like something that's lost half it's down feathering. "Sup with me. Bring my brother?”

 

“The hall is filled and your men are going to begin eating each other,” she reminds him but he's already moving towards something more awake.

 

“Very well. I will arrive before the rat cook,” he tells her as her moves from the bed to find his boots again, though he sags again, back onto his elbows and gazes at the canopy, the fall of his hair something made of moonlight in the dimness of the room.

 

“You will not be so tired as to fall asleep again, my prince?”

 

He grins at her. “Not if you help to keep me awake. What am I to wear?”

 

“Something you have not worn as bedclothes, perhaps?”

 

He rises suddenly and meets her with four short strides, he's close enough to hold her by the arms, he's close enough to taste her mouth.

 

“No one says my titles the way you do.”

 

And his smile is something so fond and familiar it makes her more homesick than the warmth on the Northern breeze of one of Margaery’s letters. She finds herself without the fortitude to imagine returning to the South.

 

“Do I say them in a certain way, Your Highness?”

 

Aegon Targaryen only tips his head forward to nod in small measure. “Sweetly,” he confirms. “Like it might be my name. There’s no one who calls be by my name anymore.”

 

“Prince Aegon.”

 

And, she curtsys low to attend to his liking for pageantry.

 

His eyes follow the line of her from crown to feet before her bows formally.

 

“Lady Sansa.”

 

 

“You have an accent, you know,” she tells him, tugging the vestiges of his traveling clothes from over chairs and the writing desk, opening a chest he has waved her towards and trying to gauge what color might best suit his mood.

 

He has never favored grooms of his own or servants dressing him, brushing his hair, it’s why he’s often seen far from his bed still dressed as if he’s half-prepared to fall back into it, why he's always sheered any great length of hair.

 

The journey North must have been a cold one for him to have grown it so long, she thinks.

 

“Do I?”

 

She pinches her fingers together. “It’s small,” she assures him holding up a blue tunic from his formal chest of clothes.

 

He smiles at it and nods.

 

“Will you help me dress?”

 

“You don’t mind?”

 

She knows he does not but yet it is required that she ask.

 

“You’re different, you don’t do it to please me.”

 

“Why do I do it then?”

 

She looks up to find him already looking at her, considering something that must be no difficult thing to find from her face.

 

“You enjoy it.”

 

She holds a new under tunic out to him, ready to drape it over his head once he's stripped from his old one. She hefts the heavy folds of his formal dress, smooths it over the back of his shoulders as his arms push into the sleeves.

 

He is not wrong, he is rarely wrong when he chooses to be astute.

 

“You’re good at it.”

 

She moves his hair for him and indulges in the thought of carding through it with comb or fingers, arranging it as she might her own or Margaery’s, her sister’s, or her King’s. She has always enjoyed the ritual of dress.

 

“There are more than a few women who enjoy pleasing others and who are good at it. Lady Margaery is far better liked than I.”

 

“You cannot forget that it was something she was trained in and paid for," Aegon tells her.

 

There is a deluge of ice that floods her guts.

 

“I’ve offended you,” he says.

 

He turns quickly to clasp her by the arms and talk away her worries. She wonders if he might try to press his mouth to hers, and remembers the taste of his.

 

“No, of course not,” she assures him.

 

He sighs and smothers a laugh, turning from her and offering her his side. “You’re like my brother.”

 

“There is some difference,” she smirks.

 

“And, now you think I’m insulting you with such a comparison.”

 

“Untrue,” she retorts straightening the edge of his tunic and brushing the waist of his breeches with the back of her hand, the heat of him is a subtle body between them, a ghost of fire it seems.

 

The pull of his mouth is the edge of a knife, so sharp she would not know it cut her, so fine it would sing when swung.

 

“You pinched me,” he jests.

 

She sniffs. “I would never do such a thing to His Highness’s royal person.”

 

“I could say you did and have you whipped.”

 

She might choose, in a single moment to let him have her, to look up from under the fall of her hair with heavy eyes and glance towards his rumpled bed and he would take her there, he would push her down upon it, and she would welcome the act, and she would welcome him.

 

She is only herself. She cannot play at games Margaery would have seen her better versed in, or that her mother rather she never known the existence of.

 

“I beg His Highness’s pardon.”

 

He shakes his head in humor. “I only meant that you’re both Northern creatures. Honor and duty.”

 

A smiles plays on her lips. “I think I know more of duty and he of honor.”

 

His face turns towards melancholy and she doesn't know why she has brought up the past.

 

He waves it all away, easily, like mist, like smoke. “Yes, you are biddable and he swears vows he is not meant to make as a prince.”

 

“And you?”

 

“I hold no oaths and am never biddable.”

 

He is, she thinks, the most honest among them, if only because he’s never needed to lie to survive, to remain among his father’s most loved, most cherished.

* * *

 

 

The indulgent sprawl of his brother helps his well nursed annoyance linger like some persistent fever-chill.

 

Aegon doesn't wither under his stare, the silver mess of his hair is more like their father’s than he’s seen it before but his brother still rubs at his ears and complains of how he can still feel the cold on them.

 

His brother grins. “How do you like having a castle of your own?”

 

The night has come in quickly.

 

He’s grateful that the meal in the hall was a short one, that his brother complained of fatigue and that no one had pressed for unnecessary celebration.

 

“Fuck off.”

 

“You’re poor sport,” Aegon tells him, grinning.

 

“It’s not my castle.”

 

Aegon only gives him half a glance before scoffing.

 

“He can’t give his bastard a Northern castle,” his brother starts. “Mistresses get castles sometimes, though.” He looks off at the room and there’s little question of what he’s truly thinking of. “Especially ones whose families he’s offended,” Aegon rakes fingers through his hair and slumps, staring at him with vipers' eyes “He knew you’d need a place more fitting than the Wall to reside and now that she’s landed and you’re North he’ll have an easier time giving commands that will actually be followed.”

 

“Where is he?” he asks because he must ask something if Aegon is ever to grow bored and drag himself back to his own chambers.

 

“Summerhall.”

 

It is more of a surprise than he wish would show on his face, the unexpectedness is strange. He should have been able to guess.

 

If there ever was a place to be his father’s legacy it would be Summerhall.

 

“What for?” he asks though he already knows,

 

Aegon’s brows rise after a long moment. “Why do you care?”

 

“It’s foolish.”

 

Aegon hums, looking troubled and glances away. “There are plenty of foolish things happening in King’s Landing. Restoring Summerhall is a wise wager for the future.”

 

They don't speak further on the discontent or of things they don't wish to acknowledge yet.

 

Discontent is a poisonous weed.

 

Other things, like war, are a bloody corpse that isn’t real until someone has begun to kill.

* * *

 

Edric brings Lord Lannister to receive her informal greeting. She doesn't rise but he inclines his head respectfully and waits.

 

“Lady Sansa.”

 

“Lord Tyrion.”

 

He follows her waved hand to the empty seat across from her small table.

 

It takes him less time than she's expected for him to cross the room.

 

“Thank you for receiving me.”

 

“You are most welcome here at the Dreadfort.”

 

He grins and it is a beautiful smile for such an unfortunately shaped man to have.

 

“What an awful name,” he remarks.

 

“Yes, isn’t it?” she asks, but she smiles and so does he and a moment later they both duck their gaze to chuckle, artfully as one can only learn in a few places within the realm.

 

“My brother tells me he has already told you of my purpose in seeking a private audience.”

 

A serving girl knocks and sets plates of simple treats between them and offers wine, though neither of them drink from their cups. They’ve both thought they were shrewder than the other. They are both pleased to be mistaken in their assumptions.

 

She presses her chin into her open palm and shuts her eyes in humor. “I don’t know how lucky you are to have a brother who gives away your plans or if you _are_ lucky to have one who is honest enough to tell you when he does it.”

 

“Honest?” The surprise under the word make her gaze across her meal at the unfortunate lord.

 

“My brother just feels very guilty about things,” he tells her.

 

“I’m sure you play no small part in making sure he doesn't lose that particular trait.”

 

“None.” He smiles at her and she might be charmed by it.

 

“I _am_ surprised,” she admits readily. “Surely, with a father such as yours, you should not still need to seek a bride. I cannot imagine he took leave of this world before securing a different kind of realm for each of his children to reign over.”

 

“Are you really, though? Surprised?”

 

There is a frown hiding behind his lips, she clicks her tongue, not liking the look of it or the implication that she is trying to hide duplicity when she is only being sincere.

 

“You're a dwarf, yes. Should I act as if you are not?” she asks sternly, then softening her tone: “Do you need me to do that?”

 

He looks calmed by her flare of irritation, his pride smoothed over and her own temper checked.

 

“Never, my lady.”

 

“Will you answer my question?” she asks, beginning her meal with precise movements of her wrists and knife.

 

“I don’t believe you asked me one.”

 

She looks up from under her brow.

 

He sighs, relenting.

 

“I’ve been offered spoiled girls, and unfortunately ugly girls, and weeping girls who have been told they would be sent to the silent sisters instead, even though I am the Lord of Casterly Rock no one offers me daughters if they might be their only children. I'm not offered the chance to help save a house that would otherwise fade into the hands of lesser relations. I'm not seen as good as that, not enough that people might swallow their pride.”

 

She wonders why he has really come north, it is not with hope of an accepted proposal, it is not anything of the sort at all, it seems.

 

“You don’t really need a bride though, do you?” she asks.

 

He doesn't answer her but his face is easily read. She puts down her knife and handles the stem of her cup.

 

“I only ask because I certainly do not need a husband, Lord Tyrion. The Lord of Casterly Rock might do as he pleases. Why marry at all?”

 

“You're more direct than I imagined.”

 

And he, she finds is as slippery as something dropped from womb.

 

“I'm a woman who is of good station, would have been, good enough for you or others,”

 

“Like Willas Tyrell or men of a kind who have certain proclivities that still need heirs.” He drinks after he says it, waiting to see if she will be angered by it and he will be cast out.

 

He is a man who would always taste his wine before leaving.

 

She is not offended.

 

“Yes, I am an eldest daughter, titled, landed. I like to think I know how to be kind and that I know how to do my duty. I'm sure you have been made to feel less than by other men and that you know regardless of that you still deserve a bride like any other man deserves a pretty, noble girl for a bride.”

 

“…”

 

“But, like I said, I don't need a husband.”

 

And, then, for a brief flicker, in the space of a breeze there is pity in the shadow of his heavy brow and strange eyes. “You still love him,” Tyrion Lannister tells her.

 

“Everyone always seems so surprised. I love him and why should I hate him? He has been what’s made my entire life.”

 

And, for once she does not know what then comes into the man’s eyes, only that it is bleak.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There's a G.K. Chesterton quote I tweaked and used in this about 'good men'

He’s come into her open solar, midday when any might find her, in the open door he is resplendent in proper attire and carefully arranged, though by who she does not know.

 

“My brother was wearing familiar stitches when I was received and all I could think was ‘why has he been so blessed by the Seven’? And, then, I thought: ‘Where is _my_ gift from the Lady Sansa?’”

  

“Your Highness.”

 

He shuts the door and sits beside the window, neck arched to look through the lozenges of glass.

 

“You must stop using my titles, no one else does. Rhaenys calls me all kinds of awful things and Jaehaerys just grunts. You used to call me Ser Aegon.”

 

“I remember,” she says softly, setting aside a pair of woolen hose she's taken up to mend.

 

“I miss it, though,” he looks towards her and follows the trail of her gown as she moves about the chamber, setting things gently back to rights. “Princes cannot be knights,” he laments, following her with attentive eyes.

 

“There are many things that many of us will never be.”

 

His head falls back and meets the window with a dull thump. He casts his gaze down onto the shadowed godswood below. “What great tragedies we have become.”

 

He’s teasing but she can't help but feel the truth in it.

 

She moves towards her slowly growing plants resting in the fall of light from the other set of paired casements, pulling the off colored parts away.

 

Flowers will bloom when the season turns. Seeds from Highgarden, sent by Willas Tyrell but more surely picked by Margaery and plucked and collected by some maidservant. They are a three handed gift that she appreciates nonetheless.

 

“I don’t think my brother is making full use of being a natural son of my father.”

 

Her reflection darkens and she turns hoping he has not seen it as he rose to come stands beside her., their shadows paired.

 

“What do you think he should do?” she asks.

 

“Go to Dorne where no one quite cares. Go to Essos and be the king of a company of sellswords, lay slavers crowns at father’s feet and be lauded.”

 

Princes can never be knights she thinks.

 

But, Aegon has never truly wanted to be a knight, she smiles when she thinks of their tender childrens' games.

 

He laughs to himself. “I didn’t realize how young we were, when we all used to play together.” He looks like his brother for a moment, fleeting, and gone.

 

“Are we so suddenly old?” she asks, disliking his thoughtful trek back towards King's Landing.

 

“I fear that is the way it sometimes feels.”

 

“What will you do?” she asks.

 

He sighs, touching gently upon her shoulder and pressing his head there for a moment before he turns to walk about the room. “Perhaps, I will oversee Summerhall while the building takes place, if my father should return to King’s Landing. If not that then perhaps Dorne, with my mother,” he adds, as if she might think it was to act a rogue.

 

She reaches to brush fallen leaves into her open hand from the floor. He is beside her again with a few slow steps.

 

“It has been some time since she has seen her maiden home,” he tells her.

 

“You are not so different from your brother.” She knows she has spoken the words in exchange for some kind of temporary distance to be set between them the moment he steps away again.

 

“We have similar motivations, at times. To be away from our father, to be like him in the ways he is good

 

She nods. “He is a good king."

 

“A man may strike down his own mother at eight hundred paces with a single arrow, I would call him a good shot before I call him a good man.

 

“He’s not so bad as that.”

 

Aegon touches upon her simply arranged hair.

 

“You would know perhaps, but he _is_ a good king.”

 

He reaches down to trail fingers along the edge of her sleeve. “People will allow for all manner of things if a bad man is a good king.”

 

“One day you will be as good a king as you are a man,” she assures him.

 

His grin is almost vicious.

 

“So long as one does not bankrupt the realm, produces heirs, and maintains a tenuous peace he is called a good king.

 

“And great kings?” she asks, less in jest than a woman grown should.

 

“What do you think?” He smiles. It seems more challenge than question as his palm ghosts warmth across her own.

 

“Great kings are the start of legacies, they die unsure of how long their name shall last. They don’t know they are great," she answers.

 

He nods. “Yes, Aegon the Conqueror reshaped the world by killing large swaths of it.” The breath they share is far too close for someone to look upon as innocent. She steps away and he doesn’t even sway with her absence.

 

“I would not know you were a poor gamesman by how well you understand the nature of kingship,” she offers to soften the space she has forced between them.

 

He laughs. “Cards and cyvesse are not the same as moving real men, if there is war one day, I will need Jaehaerys, I will need the North, I will need Rhaenys to marry for peace the way I will have to marry to check power. I will need to have a navy, I will need my uncle Viserys and aunt Daenerys to maintain the stability of slavers bay and beyond.”

 

She raises a brow.

 

“Are you sure you should be speaking of this with me?”

 

He straightens and paces in a way that would make a less sure man appear nervous.

 

“One day I will need a small council and advisors. Margaery is too ambitious, dynastically minded. She will be a Queen of Roses after the Queen of Thorns has left this realm forever. Dorne is too different and too settled, the Ironborn too weak. Stannis Baratheon is stern and severe but he is loyal and duty bound. The Lannisters are shrewd, that is as good as it is bad. _Your_ brother will be an issue perhaps, one day, because he is very proud. We are young still.”

 

He reaches for her hand and holds it; her chest is hollow.

 

“While you’re here become useful for my house," he tells her in a tone that is not fully his own. 

 

She startles.

 

He goes on solemnly. "Not in that way you had no say in but some other.”

 

She is empty of everything.

 

“The stability of the realm is more than gold and swords, it’s knowing who _knows_ and who _does_ and who fears and who acts.”

 

He's so surely a king that it's impossible to do anything but incline her head and offer obeisance.

 

“I will do my best to become what you have need of,” she assures him.

 

* * *

 

 His brother offers him a cup and a question.

 

“Are you bedding her?”

 

He takes the cup and sets it beside him.

 

Aegon twists to look at him before he sits. “Did you hear me? I asked if you’re fucking her.”

 

He scowls.

 

“You’re fucking her,” Aegon says.

 

He feels his face twist into some unfortunate façade.

 

“Oh,” Aegon smiles. “You _aren’t_ fucking her.”

 

He re-sets his cup closer to his hand. Aegon smirks at the implication that it might be thrown at him and only leans across the space set between their chairs.

 

“I could have asked if you were sharing her furs if I really wanted a rise. I’ve heard that’s what the wildlings call it when you fuck in the open where anyone can see.”

 

Aegon doesn’t flinch as he rises so fast his chair scrapes the stones, his hands are already fists. His brother only smiles. “There he is. There’s Jaehaerys. I missed you, brother.”

 

“I would strike you.” Jon warns.

 

“I could have them cut off your hands, then you’d only have your mouth to please the maidservants with. Not enough cock on you to do it the usual way.”

 

“She’s his woman, not yours.”

 

“She was his _girl_.”

 

“Nothing bothers you, does it,” he accuses.

 

His brother only rocks his cup with his palm and pretends to consider the issue at hand.

 

“Bother? I see things I do not care for all the time, I do not _let_ them bother me. Not all of us have the choice of running away to take the Black.” He slips sideways in his chair and hangs a knee over one arm, the line of his side a fallen arch and his hair spilling over his shoulders. “There are worse things than father taking a mistress and there are worse things than Sansa Stark having been one.”

 

“One fails to come readily to mind,” he tells his brother.

 

“Oh, really?” Aegon challenges.

 

He wishes his brother would go back to his own chambers. He is too awake from the fresh drawing of a wound in him to leave now.

 

“Too easy,” Aegon begins. “Being a bastard, being a dwarf, being a eunuch, guarding the king’s bedchamber, eating bad mutton…,”

 

He cuts him off. “You’re very funny.”

 

“Watching your woman die.”

 

“Stop,” he warns and Aegon’s teeth click as his mouth shuts. “Being Myrcella Baratheon,” he adds quietly before rising without his cup.

 

“Must you always be such a cunt?”

 

Aegon snorts in a decidedly unprincely manner, then his face changes, some hard vision of the king he will be.

 

“ _You_ ran away so you wouldn’t have to be amongst the filth in King’s Landing. You’re away from it all, alone at the edge of the world. You got some of what you wanted so why must you always look so fucking despairing. The rest of us must do as we've always done.”

 

He hates that face.

 

“Go on then,” he waves towards the door. “Go see if she’ll let you come to her bed. That’s what you want to ask me. My permission because our father told her he might make a gift of her to me. Well? You may, go ask if she would have you and then accept her as a gift from _me_.”

 

“You shouldn’t have said that.” Aegon remarks tonlessly.

 

His brother’s gaze doesn’t fall upon him again as he leaves.

 

“I’m not so miserly to look down my nose at a beautiful woman just to spite my father.”

 

* * *

 

 

Beside her seat at the high table he folds a hand above her wrist to gather her attention.

 

“Might I visit you?”

 

She does not turn her head to look and his own face gaze looks out on the hall.

 

“Of course, the Dreadfort is yours as you please it.”

 

“No,”

 

She knows then what he means.

 

“Might I visit _you_ , my Lady?”

 

He’s gazing at her, his knee open against her own in some tender soft seduction.

 

She inclines her head and casts her eyes down. “I don’t think it appropriate to put myself in a position such as that. His Grace allowed my return north with instructions to be amiable towards another’s attentions. I would not wish to cause offense.”

 

He says nothing.

 

“Or rancor,” she adds looking up at him.

 

He is smiling softly, out on the hall, speaking only to her. “My brother is comforted by his own spite more than anything you might do to try and ease his black moods. I don’t think it would be difficult to prevail upon him, if the idea was pleasing to you.”

 

His tone is not the hopeful one of a man infatuated, nor is it the command of one who only knows how to take from another.

 

He is congenial in his offering.

 

It is not sincerity, but neither is he lying. He is enjoying himself as he might if he were born a different man, a man who might leave the realm in the care of others so he might have all that he fancies he wants.

 

There is something childlike in it.

 

But they aren’t children anymore.

 

"I will think on it, Your Highness."

 

It is all she has the strength to offer him as an answer.

 

* * *

 

 

A voice behind her breaks the quietude the books around her offer.

 

“You are a sad creature.”

 

She turns, not offended, only suddenly made aware of his presence.

 

“My lord?”

 

Her cousin is waiting for her anger.

 

“He looks like him now. More than just a bit.”

 

She will give him bitterness if it is what he so readily would seek her out for.

 

Brothers will always try to outpace the other. Where one offers kindness the other must offer cruel reminders.

 

“I will not suffer your presence if you only seek to fill the air with vulgarities and hurtful words,” she answers moving to sweep from the library.

 

He smirks and does not move from the doorway. “You don’t appear very hurt by them.”

 

“I took you for a kind man once, quiet perhaps and thoughtful. But, I’ve found myself quite mistaken. Excuse me my lord.”

 

He grasps her tightly by the arm and leans close, the smirk twisting into some darker mocking smile, inclining his dark head closer to hers.

 

“Should I find a place to brood and skulk away from here, so you might stay and chance be seen by another man who will be called King one day?”

 

She does not need to tell him to let her go, his hand falls from her sleeve as softly as a breeze. She moves into the hall before turning on her heel to face him.

 

“No, I will be quite fine in finding some other pleasing diversion.”

 

He leans against the wall, curls falling over her brow, his eyes like a great wounded thing left out in the WInter snow.

 

“He will be gone soon and he won’t be coming back. He’s asked me for my permission. I would sooner be given a wight to take to bed than an unwanted girl. Find what comfort in him that you can.”

 

Her smile is a hidden knife.

 

“Perhaps you should find someone to take to bed so you might be comforted, comforted men are far more pleasant and do not darken doorways half as often as you.”

 

He glowers behind her as she passes down to hall.

 

* * *

 

 

She has not left her bedchamber for a day. Her body is an ache, her moonblood heavy.

 

She assures her King's son that she is well enough while still in her bed-robe under the heavy folds of the bed clothes over her knees.

 

He crouches beside her and builds up the fire in the grate.

 

He’s already asked if she is unwell and understood her hesitance to speak on it.

 

He rises and brushes ash from his knees, touching her shoulder and hair as he circles her seat to move into its twin..

 

“They speak it already,” she says, her pains lessened by sweet, cloying wine that's made her tongue heavy and words easy to tumble from it.

 

He laughs once, half-breathless. “They’ll always speak it.” And then he shrugs as if it doesn't matter.

 

It doesn't, not much. “I think that is what your brother meant to tell me, only he doesn’t say it so kindly.”

 

Aegon sighs. He looks far away, she thinks.

 

“He is embittered. His lover died, you must know that. He doesn’t want to be here, he doesn't want to be in the south with me. He’s never been without care. You remember what he was like before.”

 

“I not sure I remember as much as you do.”

 

He smiles and pours her more wine. “I remember I thought my father was marrying you. That was upsetting because I thought you were going to be mine.”

 

“Not Rhaenys?”

 

He covers the wideness of his growing smile, but it slips out around his fingers. “Oh yes, well her too. Of course. I’d hardly be the first with two wives.”

 

“I don’t think having two wives leaves a man without much work to do.”

 

“No, it wouldn’t,” he admits and then softer: “Do you miss him?”

 

“I don’t know.”

 

“And the Lady Margaery?”

 

Her face heats in a way she’s forgotten the feel of.

 

He smiles, sheepish but for show. He shakes his head and apologizes. “That was untoward of me.”

 

“It’s alright.” She looks away from him. “I suppose that I miss having a friend.”

 

“It’s alright, you know," he tells her gently, looking solemn.

 

“What?”

 

“I’m not like my brother, I don’t get offended easily.”

 

She shakes her head. “I don’t understand. I’m sorry.”

 

“You won’t look at me for more than a moment,” he explains.

 

She does look at him then, proving to herself that she can and feel nothing. “It’s harder,” she admits, and it is the truth. “You're like some mirror to His Grace.” She looks away. “But, not in every way. You are kind like him, but you don’t make me sad.”

 

“It’s alright if I’m familiar enough that you think of him.” He says, eyes narrowed and head tilted onto his fist. “At first you might think of him but you’d forget before we were through.”

 

Her face burns. Her tongue not to be trusted.

 

“You would not have me stay for a prolonged visit this night then?”

 

“No, not tonight.”

 

“One day.”

 

And she can say nothing, because it is true.

 

One day she will knock upon his door and she will go into his bed, one day she will invite him to hers and he will come quietly to it in the night.

 

He knows too and it does not make her sad, only prods at some deeply set scar, a twinging between her ribs a stitched breath.

 

“I felt badly when you brought to my notice that I had yet to present you with a gift,” she says slowly.

 

A wicked look fills his eyes, what he might say is only to be guessed at.

 

She points behind him at where his gift lies among threads and etols. He holds the tunic over his palms and traces the embroidery with easy fingertips.

 

“My lady.”

 

“Rest Well, Ser Aegon.”

 

“Might I ask for another gift, my lady?”

 

“A gift is freely given, it cannot be asked for.”

 

“I might command something of you then.”

 

“Command?”

 

“Kiss me.”

 

“You needn't waste a command on something as simple as that,” she smiles.

 

“Then it _is_ a gift.”

 

“I would not presume such familiarity, you are the prince.”

 

“Are you always so formal? I don’t think you are.”

 

Suddenly he is knelt before he, surging up. His mouth fire on her pulse and the sweep of his tongue moves over hers like wine might.

 

Once he has gone, leaving her untumbled, she looks at her bed and imagines it occupied, a silver spill across her pillows or the soft warmth of his skin, like a spring fawn reclining against the bed stead. In the dark her own callous heart warms when she imagines what look his brother might wear upon his face if she ever did lie with the true prince of his father’s kingdom.

 

She laughs lowly and watches the fire.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> you may have noticed I added an aegon/sansa pairing tag and yeah I realized this is not going to be the short jonsa I thought it was going to be, it wants to be something else, something longer and angstier and filthier.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Like I said in reply to one comment this is quickly becoming Sansa Stark's Home for Unwanted and Underappreciated Bastards so enjoy a chapter of mostly bastards, and brothers.
> 
> Gendry Rivers, Larence Snow, Edric Storm and Alleras/Sarella Sand. 
> 
> If you're a show only reader than Edric is one of Robert Baratheon's bastard (he has a noble mother), Larence Snow is a northern bastard (Hornwood) who popped up in this earlier and is Jon's squire (in this), and Alleras/Sarella Sand is one of Oberyn's bastard daughters who is in the books hanging around Oldtown, presumably to become a maester, disguised as a boy.

There is all the noise of riders in the yard and even with only his brother standing at the window, silent and world weary, Tyrion knows who it is below.

 

“Ser Bold has finally arrived.” It’s easy, he finds to mock the older knight.

 

Jaime turns, incredulous that he could be so fond of derisive jokes. “You and the Prince outrode him.”

 

The rough way his brother voice catches on his ‘r’ is so familiar it hurts.

 

It’s been a long time since they’ve had a chance to speak alone. He knows it will not be a pleasant conversation, they have not been pleasant for years.

 

“Doesn’t that bode badly for Barristan? If he is too old to keep up with his charge then what good is he? What good is he if he’s too old to keep up with _me_.”

 

“Aegon is not unprotected,” his brother says coming to sit. The light shine on the rings holding his cloak.

 

The Prince might be more so, he thinks, if he did not always try to leave his protectors behind.

 

Though, a few do manage to keep up.

 

“I thought I had noticed a few more Dornish than usual in his retinue.”

 

“One of them is a girl,” Jaime tells him, smirking.

 

“Really?”

 

“A bastard, one of Oberyn’s.”

 

He sips his wine. “How many bastards can one man have?”

 

His golden brother falls into himself, thoughtful in the worst way a man might be thoughtful.

 

If it is not their niece that is the worry it must always be their sister, _'poor Cersei'_ who only kept a household of her husband's bastards until his body grew cold. Less than that even, perhaps

 

It might still be amusing had it not been a conversation they’ve had every time they’ve been in a room together since Robert Baratheon took a bridal cloak from their sister’s shoulders and replaced it with the stag of his own.

“You look troubled.”

 

Jaime scoffs, eyes jumping around the room with his displeasure. “Oh, do I?”

 

“She’s yet untouched,” he tries to assure his brother.

             

He’s met with silence for so long that he wonders whether he ought to break his own rule of asking a question first.

 

He doesn’t need to, his brother's silence breaks. “How long do you expect that to go on?”

 

Not long, he knows. “I’m sorry, Jaime.”

 

The restraint on his brother’s face is a mess of paradox, it reddens with strain and the awful knowledge of how he has traded one duty for another, in hand with all his honor. He is a knight but he is a poor protector of those he swore his first vows too, his family.

 

His brother’s fist strikes the table, nearly upsetting the wine. “What was Cersei thinking, why didn’t you tell her?”

             

“I did,” Tyrion tells him. “As often as I saw her.”

 

His brother’s hand lies still in a puddle of summerwine, Jaime rises and shakes it from his fingers.

             

“Where are you going?” Tyrion asks.

             

“To get so drunk I forget.”

 

He almost breaks another rule he has with himself, he will not endeavor to make someone stay to ease his own conscience, to ease his own guilt. He is the Lord of Casterly Rock and he has always been his father’s son, he will not comfort a man so in love with his own despair.

             

He sighs so heavily part of his life breath must leave him for how tired it makes him. “Best efforts,” he tells the shut door in the wake of his brother’s departure towards oblivion.

 

It’s not long before they leave for the Wall, it’s not long before he leaves his golden brother north for as long as the King’s bastard will remain.

* * *

 

She knows well the secrets of many men and she can see how this man pales at the mention of Cersei Lannister.

 

His head lowers and his eyes move away from the conversation of Tyrion Lannister and his Kingsguard brother.

 

Gendry the Bastard doesn’t look at Ser Jaime in a manner not unlike how Ser Jaime will not look at her. Some small betrayal has gone unknown by all but those who have committed it.

 

In his own roughhewn way the bastard Gendry is not uncomely, he has strength in his arms and a vigor in him that the common women and maidservants have not gone unapprised of.

 

Cersei Baratheon, with all her charms, and all her hate of fine, delicate, beautiful men like the King who brought about her own lasting shame once when she was only a girl must have delighted in some secret vengeance against the nameless seething thing that is the mockery and derision of men.

 

Sansa wonders if Robert Baratheon was yet dead when his wife took his son to bed and oddly, she does not think the woman bold enough for the task if she was yet married. Stranger still, she thinks back on how she remembers Cersei and her Lord when he was still yet of the world.

 

They were stern and regal and they came to court but a handful of times and each had gazed upon the King with nothing short of leashed rage in their continence.

 

Her Aunt Lyanna was once betrothed to Robert Baratheon and Cersei Lannister had been the most sought betrothal in the realm until the royal family made visit to Casterly Rock.

 

The same man had been the start of both their fury and they must have some kind of delight or love or perhaps only ardor in their mutual hate of the same thing.

 

Marriages have been sustained by less and Cersei Lannister had been a golden shroud of grief when her husband’s body was borne home by sea. So, perhaps there was love, perhaps there was none.

 

It doesn’t matter now as Sansa crosses the yard passing the smithy and the bowed heads of Tyrion and Jaime Lannister.

 

A shadow stalks the walk above and she cannot tell which of another pair of brothers it might be.

* * *

 

 

Tyrion Lannister, distracted for a moment, looks away to greet Larence Snow and Gendry is thankful to be free of the man’s attention, he is a sharp man.

 

“Ah, a young Lord Snow, I’ve heard you’re a squire.”

             

Larence Snow looks dour and pale, as he always has. “I am,” the son of Lord Hornwood turns away to ask him: “Are his Lord’s knives ready?”

 

Jaehaerys Waters' had brought them himself to the forge, he’s even shone him his dagger of Valayrian steel, though that one never leaves his side.

 

“Yes.”

 

“I hear you have quite the head for court,” Tyrion Lannister says to the northern bastard.

 

Larence Snow’s expression does not change, he might be a man wearing a mask.

 

“If I ever go to court or another Lord’s keep I know not to scratch my arse or point out how ugly a woman might be.”

 

Gendry cannot help but smother his laugh behind closed lips, Lord Tyrion and Larence Snow catch it, regardless.

 

“I hear you have a keen mind,” Lord Lannister presses.

 

“I am a base creature born of lust with no mind but to not be whipped for tardiness in the yard, pardon my lord.” Larence Snow takes long steps back towards the entrance of the main hall to bring his master what he has recovered.

 

Tyrion Lannister settles his attention on him then. “Well, he’s no fun.” His expression belays the opposite.

 

When he opens his mouth to answer he realizes he is not the one being spoken to, as Ser Jaime, from behind him answers his brother.

 

“He knows who he can speak to that way, perhaps you should indeed ask lady Sansa to have him whipped in the yard.”

 

Gendry feels the blood drain from him at the presence of the knight.

 

“My brother has a terrible sense of humor Gendry.”

 

He does not know what serves as a greater surprise, the attempt to assuage his visible discomfort or that the Lord Lannister knows his name.

 

It is all he can do to lower his head again and say: “My lord. Ser Jaime.”

 

Ser Jaime does not even cast him half a glance. “Back to work man.”

* * *

 

 

It might be worse, he knows.

_Worse things than being named Snow._

 

It will be worse, one day.

 

He learns how not to be a lord by watching his liege.

 

He learns how to be a gentleman and a courtier and a squire though he’s not noble-headed enough to be a knight, or as fond of battle to take the violence of it to heart.

 

So, he will not be a knight and no one will call him Ser but one day he expects there might be the awful fact that the people of his father’s house they will saddle him with all the pack weight of a title and land and a castle he does not want.

 

His brother longs for a battle, just such a thing might kill a man.

 

His blood uncles do not have the heads for managing an entire swath of bannerland.

 

He learns how to hide his displeasure and disappointment and boredom by watching the Prince.

 

He remembers when he was nothing but an unacknowledged bastard, it was easier before his father laid claim on him.

 

He tries to push the black thoughts out to stop the progression of the darker things that linger always in a bastard’s mind.

 

_What if father were to die?_

_What if my brother were to die?_

_What if I were named Lord?_

* * *

 

When Edric Storm crosses the yard he is struck by how fully his half-brother shares the looks of their father. It has not been great cause for happiness. He oft time wonders where he might be if his father’s true wife had never brought his half-brother to her bed, and if he had not be so distraught by it.

 

There is quiet heaviness in his half-brother’s heart to be left with the knowledge that he has betrayed their father’s ghost.

 

He wonders if it is also so between brothers of a single father’s blood, one forever seeking penance, one looking on as voiceless witness to it.

* * *

 

The youth he’s heard called Alleras sits by himself.

 

 _Herself_ , Barristan corrects with a small smile of near laughter.

 

It would be very like one of Oberyn’s brood to come all the way North just to say they have seen both ends of the world.

 

He does not think the dark youth will stay for the entire journey south, it will depend.

 

Oberyn has always been a wordly man, it is no surprise that his children have found themselves as each an incarnation of the seven thus far as they've come of age.

 

Though they are girls they are vipers all.

 

The Prince treats the Dornish bastard with all the closeness of another brother, it's good the youth is tall and without a woman’s curves or there may be some amount of unstoppable gossip.

 

The friendship is far from a surprise beyond that much.

 

The Prince collects those that might be friends from those that might be useful one day.

 

Now, the Prince’s shadow mingles with Alleras’ and they incline their heads to exchange whispers.

 

Aegon leaves but Alleras looks up and catches his watchful eye, nodding towards the castle gate where the future king has turned up his cloak to walk towards, he turns into the stable and Barristan finds himself returning the acknowledgement.

 

So long as Alleras is close and has breath in him the Prince is safe from all threats against his personage.

 

Barristan is reminded of a time when the King himself would walk down into Flea Bottom.

 

The days were warmer and happier once and there was no madness in them.

 

There is none now in Aegon, but Barristan has lived a long time and will live longer still. Perhaps he will die before he knows the truth of what kind of man will follow as Rhaegar as King.

* * *

 

“Your brother left,” the young northman tells him.

 

He is a good squire despite his shaded looks at all around him.

 

“When?” he asks Larence Snow.

 

“Scarcely an hour.”

 

“Is he alone?”

 

Larence Snow looks askance at the room, perceptive, searching, the boy’s gaze falls upon the already made bed as if someone might still be upon it.

 

“No,” the boy tells him. “The Dornishman went with him.”

 

“…”

 

“Do you want me to saddle you horse? My Lord?”

 

“No,” he answers, shaking his head. “My brother does not like to be followed.”

 

“I don’t think anyone likes to be followed,” Larence Snow says, still looking about the room in half-glances. “Do we leave for the Gift soon?” the boy asks him, slowly.

 

“After my brother returns.” He shakes his head and looks up from his letters and over the ankle he’s perched on the table edge from his slouch. “What are you looking for?”

 

The boy startles, a throttled cough stuck in his throat. “My lord?”

 

He pins the boy with a glance. “Either you’re trying to find proof of a night guest, or my bed is of considerable interest to you personally. Which is it? I can tell you that you won’t earn my favor quite like that, boy.”

 

“I’m not- my lord.”

 

He waits for an answer, pressing for one with a steady gaze.

 

His squire swallows.

 

“I am your squire, it is part of my duties to make sure the things you would keep unknown _remain_ unknown.”

 

“And what things would I wish to keep unknown?”

 

“Lady Sansa, my lord.”

 

He laughs.

 

Larence Snow takes a small step back.

 

“You,” he begins, “are a terrible sneak, Larence." He looks back to his correspondence. "She’s not my creature.”

 

The boy does not look convinced, staring again at the bed and the room as if the woman herself might spring from behind a wall tapestry or from beneath the bed.

 

“Oh.”

 

He laughs, unable to help himself.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> See guys, Jon's not always grumpy. He's not always a royal douche.
> 
> The Robert Baratheon I picture here is one who found a mutually shared hate of Rhaegar with Cersei and actually made their marriage work. There's a fic I might write in that idea, someday.


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, my laptop died as I was in the middle of writing this and lost some progress I made on and had to rewrite it a lot of it.
> 
> Which sucked, and then the new laptop had issues and needed to be exchanged. 
> 
> Suffice it to say I am very glad to be back in the saddle here.

Edric Storm enters her solar already looking repentant. She holds back her smile. “He’s left, my lady,” he says, looking towards her, steadfast in some resolute desire to please her and prove himself at the same time.

 

“For the Wall?” she asks not yet raising her eyes from her larder to acknowledge his earnest attempt at keeping her informed despite risking her displeasure.

 

“Ser Barristan left before the hall broke fast.”

 

“And he left with Lord Lannister?” she asks, shifting in her seat to wrap her legs more fully with the folds of her heavy dressing gown.

 

“Ser Jaime remains.” Edric tells her recentering himself, still peering at her.

 

“Has my cousin risen yet?” she asks banally.

 

“I don’t know.”

 

“Edric,” Sansa chides, eyes half-raised to catch sight of him shift uneasily again, he’s been staring at her unbound hair and the pale skin of her throat, now he stares resolutely at the stones that form the far wall of her chamber. It's strange to observe such a thing from him but not completely surprising, they’re closer in age than she’s realized before but she is a woman while Edric Storm is yet a boy.

 

The boy stakes himself with a harder stance and bows before her. “I will endeavor to be more informed, my lady,” he readily promises, an apology sits on his tongue that she kills with a question.

 

“Ravens?”

 

“There’s one from your father.”

 

She hums holding out her hand, expectant of a letter to be placed upon it, but not of the name the one laid there bears, written in her father’s tidy scrawl. It is not for her.

 

“My lady.”

 

And, Edric Storm has turned swiftly without a look behind before she can ask why he’s thought to give her such a thing.

 

He's gone quickly from the room and it would not do to rise and call him back from the doorway of her chamber or try to outpace him in the hall while not yet dressed properly for the day.

 

The snarl of her father’s house impressed in wax offers her it’s teeth from the corner of her lectern where she’s set it, the name of its intended hidden.

* * *

 

 

The ride has left him with a renewal of the saddle soreness he thought he overcame on the journey North.

 

Tyrion Lannister wishes only for a soft place to lie down and wine enough so he might outsleep the cold, he is swiftly foiled by the grinning arrival beside him.

 

“Is this what you thought the end of the world would look like?” the King’s son asks him, grinning even wider, he is the perfect youth of a perfect union that has allowed the world to rest on a tentative peace for far longer than it would have otherwise.

 

Tyrion Lannister considers the wall that’s almost lost in the upward torment of the sky. “To see the end of the world I’d have to go to the top and look down, piss over onto the other side,” he replies, offering back a grin of his own.

 

Aegon’s brows rise and he chuckles softly. “I’ll leave you to your discovery then, Lord Tyrion.”

 

And, he leaves with his Dornish shadow slinking alongside him, a bow straddles the dark youth’s shoulder.

 

Tyrion misses the company of his own brother and wonders if the prince feels something of the same.

 

* * *

 

He looks at her and finds nothing but a woman who is an effigy of another man's handling.

 

Sansa Stark is made of staunched Northern pain and Southern ideals. She is a wound carved into stone and a vision of court song that is more familiar than he wishes he noticed.

 

She reminds him of the queen and all her silent pains, excusing herself from sight so she needs not look on what the king does.

 

Sansa Stark places the sealed letter upon his nearly empty desk but does not leave when he breaks its seal between his thumbs, putting eyes to the words but not yet reading them.

 

“Did you seek to read it?” he asks her coolly.

 

If she shrugs basely he doesn't catch it.

 

“I admit some curiosity as to why my father writes. I suspect it's because he finds a more worthwhile student to offer his wisdom to in you than in those others around him.”

 

Her tone lacks warmth and bitterness bites at it.

 

“You don’t think your brothers worthy?” he asks, looking up to find her stare settled on the window, a statue.

 

“I have three brothers,” she tells him, as if she’s answered in a way he might understand and he’s only too dim to make sense of it.

 

Sansa Stark sighs and crosses to the other side of the room and gazes from the window, looking down into the yard with her hands folded together in front of her.

 

“My father takes my brothers to the block where he beheads deserters from the wall and others, rapers and murderers all.” She smiles softly with closed eyes and looks at him once she’s opened them again. “I saw a man die in the first tourney I went to watch,” she confides. “I hadn’t yet flowered.” And, she laughs behind closed lips, as soft as a whisper.

 

“My brother Robb saw no man die until my father returned from the Iron Islands sometime after that.” 

 

“You call your own brother a boy because he hadn’t watched a man die?”

 

Sansa Stark smirks and he can only wonder if she is playing a kind of game with him or trying in some way to find something of her to better suit his mood. He doesn’t think her unaccomplished in such things but finds himself immune after much experience.

 

He remembers the women of court, the women all along the Kings' Road, the woman beyond the wall. He’s a harder man to entice than he was before, harder still than his brother, he would like to think though never knowing for sure.

 

“Robb was still called a boy after I’d been decided a woman,” she says.

 

His head aches and the bitterness dies on his tongue.

 

“So,” she asks him, “How fares my father?”

 

Jaehaerys Waters excuses himself from her presence, taking his letters with him.

 

He wonders, if he were to look, what expression her face would wear, if it is still possible to hurt a woman like Sansa Stark anymore.

 

* * *

 

 

The maester’s chambers are less warm than he’s expected, though the old man seems unbothered by it, he is not immune himself.

 

He’s told Alleras to wait outside so he might speak to one of his own progenitors.

 

Aemon Targaryen is near to one hundred years Aegon’s been told, the old man is less boring than books of a similar age, he finds.

 

“My father was called ‘The Anvil’, he had his own coat of arms and they used it all through his reign,” his grandfather’s great-uncle tells him.

 

“Sometimes, I feel things that aren’t meant often turn out better than the things that are expected,” Aegon admits, thinking of his own family’s history of upsets and upstarts, tragedy woven in amongst the threads of their glories.

 

Aemon Targaryen smacks his dry mouth and squints, Aegon pours him ale and only relinquished his hold once aged fingers have wrapped around his own.

 

“It is much easier to make peace with one brother than three,” the maester tells him. “I’d know.” The near toothless mouth collapses in a grin that might be happy if it were not so aged.

 

“Egg had the Stranger’s luck,” his eldest grand uncle tells him.  “He, and Dunk. He could make men rise to his whims with only a joke and the promise of a fight well earned.

 

“Our father never forgave him for what happened later. Our father had a brother of his own, one everyone loved. There were many men who would have called Baelor Targaryen king and been happier for it.”

 

The old man laughs like his corvids then.

 

“That was the unexpected thing that caused a hundred lifetimes full of grief for all of us.

 

"My brother, Daeron, had dragon dreams and something dark grew inside of him, carved out a place in him, and it and us who were closest sent him towards the madness that knows itself. Daeron lived wholly in dreams at the end.”

 

The maester goes quiet.

 

Aegon considers his own brother, deciding that, at the end, that Jaehaerys will live in armor and honor holding a bloody sword, unable to escape but willing to cut through. It’s the way that lives begin and end for the brothers of kings and Aegon is suddenly sadder for it.

 

“They were the brothers I loved,” the maester tells him, heedless of the silence, “The brothers I abandoned and the brothers I hated. There was Aerion, who died before my father. That we were all gladder for it says it all,” Aemon confides, frowning into his forgotten soup, unaware of Aegon’s own opinion of the family history he’s read of in his father’s books.

 

“Aerion might have been king but his love was a terrible thing, the histories might say he abandoned us, but after a time there was nothing that could quell his spite or his striving to be a greater man. But, the great men who were our idols, our cousins and uncles, were darker men than we knew.

 

“Our father, did not live up to Aerion’s expectations of them and it made him look for a father he could only find parts of in men like Brynden, Aegor, and Daemon. And, soon that was who Aerion became.

 

“They talk about how he died, but that’s all I've heard, or read,” Aegeon tells him.

 

Aemon nods. “Sometimes a man’s death casts a shadow over his whole life and his shame, hiding it. And, there’s no greater shame than madness. If ever there was a man with as much want for glory as the Conqueror it was Aerion, not since _that_ Aegon was there another who longed so much to hold the world in his hands like an egg to be cracked open and devoured.”

 

“If Aegon the Conqueror came again, would we rally for him or trample his bones?” Aegon asks the old man.

 

The old man smiles at him.

 

“Men who are conquered are not men you rule, they are men you kill, and frighten. They are men who try to kill you if you don't fall from such great heights as the sky on your own.”

 

“Who else was there?” Aegon asks the maester.

 

A raven croaks like the Wall itself creaking.

 

“Oh, Aelor and Aelora, twins, and then Daenora too, just as important and just as vicious as the rest, just as wise and foolish and sad. And, me.”

 

“Where were you?” Aegon asks him.

 

“I was in Oldtown, polishing a statue of my great-great uncle with his sword pointed towards Dorne, forging my chain while our house suffered. Keep close your brother, he might be Orys or he might be Bittersteel,” the old man warns.

 

Aegon wonders what will become of them one day, what other men will write of him and his brother, of their sister, of their shared father and their sad mothers each.

 

* * *

 

 

Edric Storm finds her as dusk settles in around the dark stones.

 

“They quarreled the morning he left, my Lady. Your cousin and the prince,” he tells her back.

 

“About what?” she asks in the shadow of a jagged merlon.

 

He shifts stones with his feet, looking down. “I do not know,” he admits.

 

“That’s very well then, Edric. You may go.”

 

“I’m sorry, my Lady,” he apologizes.

 

“Edric.”

 

“Yes, My Lady?”

 

She makes sure to smile as she turns. “Ignorance does not always warrant an apology.”

 

“Thank you-…”

 

“Do better,” she interrupts, waving him towards his duties in the yard, catching his grin as he goes.

 

* * *

 

 

Aegon blows out the taper he’s used to light the candles the spare cell-ish room.

 

“Egg was no better King than the rest of us would have been,” the old man admits.

 

“But, you said no to the Kingship.”

 

“Kingship is not a question. It is conferred. I abandoned it. But, if I had not there would be no you.”

 

Aegon is unsure if the words are some blessing or some kind of curse.

 

* * *

 

 

“He didn’t offer an invitation did he?” a voice questions.

 

Sansa scowls where he cannot see before she turns to the stretch of the floor he’s come to stand on.

 

“He must think himself in love. The perfect fool,” her cousin mutters.

 

She turns her head sharply again from her seat, thinking him unable to ever let a moment go on without crossing it with some new line of dissent.

 

“Must you scorn everyone?” Sansa asks, weary of him. “As if your grief triumphs above all? If you’re unhappy here then go north,” she says.

 

His jaw is tight and she keeps a laugh in check.

 

“You’re afraid of his displeasure, still? His grace has other concerns besides your happiness or your wounded pride,” she tells him.

 

“Ah, and you know my father’s mind enough to know his concerns.”

 

She could scoff at him.

 

“You would see your brother off with a scowl, though I would think you have no cause for strife between you. It wounds to think yourself hated by your own kin, I should know, but I do not understand you at all, Jaehaerys. I thought once I might endeavor to try.”

 

His dark eyes are half-cast as he looks at her. “You cannot mend others in place of yourself cousin,” he tells her, voice closer than it had been when she’d been looking up at him.

 

“It’s no worse than tearing out the seams,” she replies, holding herself back from looking up as he lays letters across her hands.

 

The wax of her father’s sigil is a broken and familiar, the red gleam of his own remains uncracked.

 

Eddard’s Starks scrawl is black writ between the open wings of parchment.

 

_‘Take care of my-…”_

She pushes both parchments from her hands to complete her own correspondence first.

“Was there anything else, my Lord?” she asks, losing patience with him.

His stare is full of some question, it seems, he leaves her to the quiet contemplation of the motives of other men.

 

* * *

 

 

“And what of women,” Aegon asks, chin on his fist, full of mirth. “Have you no advice for me on them?”

 

The old man smiles blindly. “They are what we make them to be.”

 

As if it's obvious.

 

“And what have we made them?”

 

“The best of us, the worst just as often as that,” the old man tells him, smile fading like the candlelight.

 

* * *

 

 

She's awakened while a candle is still burning in its dish, the edge of her mouth wet with sleep and her eyes blurring. The maid servant shakes her softly. “My lady, Edric Storm has requested you rise.”

 

“What hour is this?” she questions softly.

 

“It’s late, my lady.”

 

It must be, she thinks, looking at the girl, rumpled from sleep herself, night plait whispering hairs and eyes freshly rubbed awake.

 

“He’s waiting in the solar, my lady.”

 

The girl helps her into a bed robe and turns to find a brush.

 

“It is well enough,” Sansa says, stepping from the girl away. “To bed with you, go and rest while you can.”

 

The boy is half dressed, himself, boots unlaced and shirt stays mismatched.

 

“Edric,” she says, making him turn. “Why have you come to rouse me from my bed so far ahead of dawn?”

 

“Apologies, my lady. Wildlings at the gatehouse, seeking audience with Lord Jaehaerys, a woman and four men, he offered them bread and salt before new riders approached calling them murderers and mutilators. The yard will not settle.”

 

“Bring me my cloak and my boots and find an end to all that, bring Ser Jaime to help you along.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> and yeah, guess who's showing up now


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just a note: Medger is the Lord of House Cerwyn, in the books Cley Cerwyn is his only son who has a sister name Jonelle, in the show Cley Cerywn has an unnamed brother who is the heir to house Cerwyn who is skinned alive and killed by Ramsay along with their mother and father. For the purpose of this fic I used the brother idea and named him Jonnel which I thought was appropriate. 
> 
> Enjoy. (and sorry for the wait).

The yard is a din, between horses and men she follows behind Ser Jaime who pushes men from his path like loose forest pinings and before Edric Storm who mind her heels carefully as he keeps pace behind.

 

Her cousin pushes the lithe figure of a stranger behind him as a red-bearded wildling turns his axe on his palm.

 

A Cerwyn black battleaxe flashes on a field of silver while bloodied hands reach for the cadre of wildlings holding their horses between them.

 

“What noise is this? In this hour?” she asks as loud as she needs to bring eyes to her.

 

“Who asks?” calls a Cerwyn bannerman.

 

“Lady Sansa of Dreadfort, Daughter of Eddard Stark Warden of the North.”

 

“These butchers!-…”

 

“Plough your mothers!” shouts a wildlings harshly.

 

“Enough!” Edric Storm thunders as Jaime Lannisters takes his more suitable place beside his charge.

 

“Who is this that bleeds?” Sansa asks eyeing the man thrown over the saddle of the uneasy mare Cerwyn mare before her.

 

“The young Lord Cerwyn, Jonnel set upon by wildling thieves, my lady,” a man at arms answers.

 

“Says the failed one,” spits a lithe wildling who Sansa can tell now is a woman where she thought at first she was another man.”

 

“Says the raper,” adds Jaehaerys, clutching his sword tighter.

 

“Bastard,” someone hisses.

 

Jaime Lannister’s sword barely scratches as it leaves its sheath.

 

“Ser," Sansa says, "See these guests inside, Edric bring the maester for Lord Cerwyn. Do so now.”

 

* * *

 

 

Her cousin paces restlessly, relentless, with harsh gestures moving from his hands, his dark hair run through too many times by his own yanking fingers.

 

“You would kill a northern man for the sake of a wildling girl, you will bring the north down on you in a way my father cannot control, if you kill him without your brother saying such is allowed. They will say other things about you that cannot be undone. Then you will be right in casting off your father’s love because there will be none allowed him towards you should you usurp your brother’s authority.”

 

Her cousin turns sharply, a scowl set in place and stuck.

 

“If you would trust my father, then trust me to keep my own castle in the manner he would,” she pleads.

 

“You’re an arpagee who thinks she’s in love with the one who spoiled her.”

 

She starts but doesn't step back, swallows her sharp-sour words down hard.

 

“Yes well, Jonnel Cerwyn will not leave before your brother has passed judgement, and you will hear it and be satisfied. Stop pacing and wait. The Wildling Princess sleeps, sit with her after you’ve calmed yourself. She will be greatful to wake and see some kind, familiar face.” She extends her cup, untouched but only half-full.

 

He swallows the full measure of it before the taste numbs his tongue, before he spits upon her slippered feet and his furious eyes hold on her cool gaze, even as he rocks back and even as his hand slips from purchase on the chair he seeks to stumble back towards.

 

“Don’t look at me so spitefully, just sit. It’s stronger than you used to I’m sure. You may hate me more for it once you can think well again.”

 

The poppy laced wine brings sleep and ease into his bones.

* * *

 

The knight has been brought quietly to her cousin’s solar, he doesn’t speak to ask why.

 

He’s more well-mannered than that and smarter too, she suspects if only because a man such as Lord Tywin had been his father.

 

“Ser Jaime, you know what is at stake?” Sansa asks knowing already that he does.

 

The knight nods once.

 

“Yes my lady, I will not leave this door,” he says, standing his place before her cousin’s chamber door.

 

She cannot help but sigh for Jaime Lannister, it seems to be his lot forever that he will be left standing in front chamber doors behind which sleeping Kings or Princes lie.

 

“Protect him from himself,” Sansa says, rising from her creaking chair, Edric storm following behind.

 

The small bottles that hide the dark groove of the table wood gleam, their milky contents opaque and promising some taste of rest or quiet or release.

* * *

 

The bloody rags and boot prints that track the floor remind her of a birthing chamber, the stories of a city sacking, the sounds though, are similar to distressed livestock, a knacker’s yard.

 

Soon, though, the ragged, harsh crying out dies like the wind finishing its howling, mumble mouthed mewls remain. She enters then.

 

“Maester Wolkan,” she says.

 

The man starts, blood on every cuff and every finger. “My Lady, you need not be here,” he says with the words tumbling from his lips.

 

“But, I am,” she says. “How is Lord Jonnel?” she asks, head tipped back, nose reaching for cleaner air.

 

The maester is pale.

 

“He has been unmanned, my lady.” He looks down upon his patient. “Partly, and painfully so. I have staunched the bleeding but-…”

 

“Let me see.”

 

And he does.

 

She glances at the mess between the man’s bloodied thighs, legs like the dead limbs of some fallen tree in their pale splayed presentation.

 

“…that is an unkind wound indeed, maester? Draw up his bed clothes," she sighs. "Do what you can.”

 

Her boots mark her passage out into the hall. “Edric,” she says, not looking at her castellan though he’s waiting beside the door for her reappearance, wan but holding his last meal well.

 

“My lady,” he says, eyes glancing towards the closing door of the maester’s chambers. She waits until she once again has his gaze and attention.

 

“Make sure to have these tracks cleaned, it would not do to have a shade licking at our steps to find his next meal.”

 

She is not unapprised of how well her cousin’s beast can hunt on scent alone, but there is no cause to make it easier to find the wounded man.

 

* * *

 

The days do not grow shorter or easier and Edric comes again to announce that more guests have come.

 

“Lord Harrion. More arrivals come daily it seems, I believe there are enough chambers left for you and your men.”

 

“It happened on our land,” he tells her, having swept into the room from the hall with as much presence as his destrier once she's invited him in to speak on matters neither of them are genteel enough to ignore are happening. He doesn’t ask to shut the door as he pushes back with his boot heel to do so.

 

“Why were they there you think?” she asks, twisting in her chair, allowing him his high ground and his restless pacing.

 

He stops, drags one large hand over his wind-roughened hair.

 

She hides a smile behind her palm, men are all the same in their displays.

 

His cheeks are wind-chapped and he is not an unfortunate looking man. When he glances at her his eyes linger longer than they have before, yet they remain polite.

 

“Medger sent his sons in his stead for a wedding feast.”

 

“And what do you seek here then, Lord Harrion? Shouldn’t you be home enjoying the festivities of such an occasion.”

 

“Harrion will do well enough now, my lady,” he says firmly, stalling his pace. She inclines her head and stares for a moment. His face softens, too much softness to simply be polite. She looks away toward her correspondence dismissively.

 

“As you say,” she says. “What do you seek her then, Harrion?”

 

He has turned and seated himself hearthside when she glances again, hand around his mouth, strong legs too large for the chair he’s chosen. “The wildlings have proved to be less of the menace my father and uncles have feared them to be.” He rubs his mouth before he goes on.

 

“I remember the woman and her man and the big friend of Lord Waters. If there’s to be a trial my father would see me bear witness to it.”

 

“To what end?” she asks, genuine enough in her confusion that his own look twists again towards the same.

 

“There is a tentative compromise with the Wildlings,” he tells her, the idea an uneasy one for him, she would think, though his face shows none of such preponderance. “I can see that it’s best to preserve it. Spring is here, Summer will come again, no Karstark man wants to die before they’ve had a moment to get warm away from their hearths again,” he grumbles.

 

“Sensible.”

 

Harrion Karstark looks up, a sharpness in his gaze like she’s managed to offend him without meaning to.

 

“We wait now for the Prince to return from the Wall. If a trial is to proceed he will preside over it, it’s only right and it will be demanded by the Cerwyns.”

 

“You’ve sent word then?” he asks.

 

“Yes.”

 

“Good,” he tells her, as if she’s done something he’s asked of her.

 

She raises a brow, turning towards him with a careful look, goading by the half smile that lingers behind her lips. His mouth turns and his neck colors, his soft glances are once again directed towards the other side of the room however.

 

* * *

 

She lingers only long enough to gauge the damage done.

 

It is nothing so horrible as a man might do and surely, she thinks, worse has been done to other women.

 

There’s no kindness in the thought that the woman resting in her bed has seen a tempered version of a man’s violence.

 

She sits, not reaching to lie a hand over the broken knuckles of the wildling woman, only waiting until she is truly asleep, no longer pretending.

 

She knows it is not the violation that is the worst of things, it is the loss, if there should be one, of something greater; a lover, a family or one’s true name gone unwhispered and tainted with ruin.

 

“My cousin will wish to see you when he wakes, I’ve had to keep him to his own chambers, he’ll kill the man you cut for what he’s done. Perhaps he will still die. You and yours will be safer if he survives until the prince comes.”

 

“My man is already dead, what do I care about safe. Leave me be, wretch.”

 

And Sansa goes, temper unrisen, as cool as the stone under her palms as she presses them to the wall outside the chamber door once she has closed the door again.

 

* * *

 

The Cerwyn men have not left their rooms often for such a thing as wandering, they sup amongst themselves and speak amongst themselves and she’s considered it a well enought thing to let them rest for the few days she’s needed to settle her keep and keep knives from throats until Aegon arrives from the Wall.

 

Cley Cerwyn has found her and she is surprised by his candor, and by his pain.

 

In between the rows of filled shelved he speaks with her, perhaps the only person to hear what he has to say.

 

“He thought himself a sportsman, and a hunter. Ramsay Snow took notice of that. They spent much time together.” Cley Cerwyn tells her, smiling pitifully from his slouch.

 

“I've heard stories about what would happen on Bolton land,” she tells him, watching him twist his fingers together, ashamed of his more monstrous kin.

 

“Not just on Bolton land, my lady,” he says, raising his face. She can see that he has not slept well either. 

 

No one in the keep has, she thinks.

 

“I’ve been unsettled by my brother,” he tells her. “I wish I could dredge up the kind of bond blood calls for but there’s nothing to call upon that could make it so.”

 

“You tell me this for a reason, Lord Cley?” she asks, carefully, always carefully, she thinks, so as not to spook a man who might be made an ally, a man who is wanting to be made good and worthy and unshamed again by what others of his name have done.

 

Cley Cerwyn is not a man who wishes to be judged by the sins of his kin.

 

“My brother has learned to kill what he’s wounded, he is not done and he thinks you will not punish him for it.”

 

Sansa smiles, small, leans closer to lay hands over his fidgeting fingers. “You might have ended that without the lie at the end,” she tells him. “You’re brother gives no thought to punishment, and would not brag of it if he thought I would not. You have ambition of your own, I think, Lord Cley.”

 

The boy-man swallows roughly, pulling his hands gently from her finer ones.

 

He looks away from her, ashamed again, but not as guileless as she’s expected him to be.

 

“Forgive me, my lady I meant no offense.”

 

“Hush then,” she commands softly. “And listen. You should speak with your brother and see what you might do to quell his pain at being so unmanned. Men do desperate things when they’ve been brought so low. To others or themselves.”

 

Cley Cerwyn looks confusedly up at her, unsure and uneasy.

 

He only thinks he doesn’t understand her. But, he does, he understands well enough, she’s sure.

 

* * *

 

He catches the hushed, harsh end of a conversation as he passes the shut door of the Cerwyn sick room.

 

The maester and Jonnel argue, as much as a maester may labor a point with a guest lord, about how he should be abed and not about.

 

It does not sound like a pleasant exchange.

 

The man has been up when he should be at rest.

 

Jaime Lannister bites at his cheek until it tastes like iron, passing Cley Cerwyn as he comes from the opposite end of the hall looking grim.

 

He wishes he might tell the younger son to do well and keep the next Cerwyn lord from sight of wildlings long enough to survive and keep a small war from starting within the walls they’ve all come to reside within but he finds he doesn’t have the nerve when the man’s brother looks at him with such grey, haunted eyes.

A man who knows a monster but not how to stall one.

* * *

 

Tormund has come to ease the cloistered feel of his isolation.

 

His head feels like some cloven stone. He’s been three days asleep and his father’s guard still lingers outside the chamber door.

 

“She went to the trees to piss, alone, never came back” Tormund tells him, legs stretched out before the hearth.

 

His friend sighs as heavily as a bear.

 

“Jarl found her, got himself killed. But, she caught up and we rode hard here.

 

“Did she say anything?” he asks Tormund.

 

“Jarl saw, before he got stupid and dead.”

 

“Where were you?” Jaehaerys asks heavily.

 

“Getting pissed, thought they were tupping.”

 

At least he is honest Jaehaerys thinks, the self-recrimination has hollowed his friend’s cheek and blackened his eyes.

 

“Where is she?”

 

Tormund shakes his head. “She’s not going to talk to you, she’s still raw about it.”

 

“Nothing happens, not yet,” Jaehaerys Waters nearly hisses, heavy headed still from the poppy, his hands weak, finger slack useless for a blade for awhile yet.

 

“Fuckers got her hair, still,” Tormund tells him.

 

* * *

 

It not hard to notice the man staggering loosely around the yard at dusk, the hall dines but he’s only  solitary figure about without it.

 

The forge stands warm instead of hot, no hammer sings on its anvil and a man might rummage and forage through the roofed square, almost unseen.

 

Larence Snow watches a pale, thin, mutilated man cross the yard again with haggard strain belying his troubles, one long length of chain wrapped about his arm beneath the ragged cloak whose hood that does little to hide the hook of a Cerwyn nose from sight.

 

Masterless again, on such an evening, a young squire might see all sorts of unusual things.

 

The bastard Snow lingers, stuck over what person to tell such strangeness too, hopping down from his perch upon the broken walls arch and disappearing along paths he’s memorized in the dark himself.

 

* * *

 

He sees her and wants to kill the man lying in careful repose somewhere within the same walls as them. He reaches for her shorn hair and she pushes his hand away.

 

“Don’t get sentimental, Prince,” Val says, face impassive, unimpressed by his rage.

 

“I’ll kill him,” he swears.

 

She scoffs. “You don’t get to do that.”

 

The woman men call princess in only half-jest runs a hand over her chopped hair.

 

“He strangled Jarl with the length of it. You don’t get to kill him. Prince.”

 

He sighs sadly then. “You know I can’t let you do it.”

 

“Will you force me to drink dream wine?” She ask him, taunting.

 

He wonders how many others know how he was kept abed for so long.

 

“Don’t make it come to that, Val.”

 

He leaves the room behind resolved.

 

* * *

 

 

The news just delivered to her is strange, unexpected but not surprising.

 

“Do you trust the Hornwood boy?” she asks the yet youngest member of the Kingsguard.

 

“He is not a Hornwood, my lady,” Jaime Lannister answers, as if it makes a great difference to her what the squire is given the name of.

 

She inhales slowly and lets go of the breath carefully, thinking. “Do you think him untrustworthy, then because he is a bastard?”

 

“I think,” Jaime Lannister says slowly, “that he is a boy who prefers shadows.”

 

“Edric,” Sansa says, rapping upon her lectern for his attention.

 

“Yes, My Lady?”

 

“Bring me Larence Snow. Quietly. And secure my cousin’s beast.”

 

She is decided.

 

* * *

 

Jaime Lannister is good at following commands. He’s done it all his life for one master or another.

 

A father, a king, a prince, and now a girl.

 

It’s not so large a weight on him when it’s one he’s caused harm to through inaction and not his own king giving the command.

 

“Put this on,” he tells the squire who is, for the moment, rudderless without his Lord to command him himself.

 

“Sodomite,” the boy accuses.

 

“Don’t flatter yourself, Snow. Put it on. You’re the only one of us pretty enough to pretend to be a woman.”

 

Larence Snow sniffs at the rough spun garment.

 

“This doesn’t smell like a woman, it smells like a goat.”

 

“You’re supposed to be a wild woman. Even so, try not to walk about so bowlegged.”

 

* * *

 

The pair on the battlements goes unseen, they think.

 

“What is that for, brother?” A man who is not a great lord asks the other who will be, one day.

 

“A proper send off,” Jonnel says, the words rising from his throat as rusted things.

 

“For who?” Cley Cerwyn asks.

 

“You may help or ask questions,” Jonnel tells him. “Choose.”

 

Cley Cerwyn helps circle the chain, cinch it tightly against the stone through the rings of the banner line. “I know where her rooms are,” he tells his brother.

 

The man who will be called Lord Cerwyn one day twists and grins, it is not a nice grin.

 

“Just when I thought you absolutely useless, you surprise me now, ickle brother.”

 

Cley Cerywn cannot help but offer a watery smile back.

 

Too suddenly, the elder Cerywn leans too close, breath stinking of poppywine, eyes red with pain and sleeplessness, words as equally foul as his waxen visage, a skull with death stretched over it. “Where was your fucking nerve when that bitch cut me, though? Should I throw you off first then, brother?”

 

Cley Cerwyn stops, continence wiped clean out of necessity. He allows his tone to sink low, an attempt to seem crueler than he’s ever been, than he ever could be, the sound of voice he’s heard come the mouths of others more loathsome than even his brother could ever hope to be.

 

“Do you want to kill your runaway whore or do you want to make a fool of yourself trying to command me now?” Cley Cerwyn asks his brother, a duplicity even the last masters of the Dreadfort would have approved soundly of in his tone.

 

Jonnel steps back to consider him with a grimace and a mutter about how he should go and do what he’s been told to do.

 

Cley Cerwyn goes.

 

* * *

 

The body sways from the battlements.

 

The maester said the man was in much pain, accompanied by much weeping, inconsolable in his deficit and sudden lacking.

 

It's no great surprise, many will say, in what a man might do if no longer considered a man at all.

 

No one questions it and so the matter ends.

* * *

 

Cley Cerwyn tries to speak with her churlish cousin but he keeps himself to one side of the room, stoic and colder than winter's own bones.

 

“Lord Cley.” Her voice has both turning quickly in alarmed surprised. “What is it that you have found?” she asks even as she is slowly presented the fair plait of hair from young Cerwyn’s own hand.

 

“It is the Lady’s Val..., it is," he begins, clearing his throat. "The Lady’s Val hair. I found it within my brother’s pack”

 

It is a surprisingly heavy thing as she hefts it between both hands, grasp gentle and fingers careful on its smooth links.

 

Both men look as if they don’t know whether they should have given it to her.

 

“I will bring this back to the Lady Val,” she tells them as she turns, long gown sweeping the floor, her own plait falling back over her shoulder, swaying against the center of her back with a weight she realizes anew.

 

Their alarm does not look well relieved.

 

When she finds the wildling Lady in new chambers that have been made up for her with a new fire and fresh rushes the woman doesn't look comfortable, or at rest. She looks unassuaged even by the death of that man she has been dishonored by, if dishonor is some thing that the wildlings give much thought and regard.

 

“The maester tells me you have healed well,” Sansa says.

 

“There’s been no more blood. If that’s what you mean.”

 

“They found your hair.”

 

“Keep it.”

 

Sansa doesn't frown, only looks down upon the plait in her hands. “I feel like Ser Duncan.”

 

“Who?” the wildling asks. "Is that the lord of this place?”

 

Sansa shakes her head. “No. He was a knight, many stories are told about him. He cut off the braid of Lady Rohanne as a parting gift before he said goodbye to her forever and she married another. He’d already refused an offer a marriage from her himself.”

 

“Did he fuck her first?”

 

“I don’t know, the songs say not.”

 

“Then it’s not the same, is it?”

 

Val the wildling turns away from her.

 

“Are you sure I should have it?” Sansa asks.

 

“I’ll just burn it.”

 

“Very well, if that's what you wish to do with it,” and she extends it towards the wildling again who will not take it back. “Burn it?” Sansa asks, curious to see if she will take it.

 

She doesn’t.

 

“No.” Val the wildling relents. “Keep it.”

 

They sit together in the quiet, beside the fire for a long time passing some foul concoction between them.

 

“This place is big.”

 

“It is,” Sansa agrees.

 

“Is Prince Crow your man?”

 

“He’s kin.”

 

“This isn’t his fort.”

 

“No, he’s my guest.”

 

“Which one of them is your man. The fair one, or the dark one?”

 

“Ser Jaime is my cousin’s kingsguard-”

 

“Not him.”

 

“Ah," Sansa says. "Would one call Harrion Karstark fair? Well, he’s discomfited by the notion of a fine lord’s daughter without husband and with castle, I suppose. And, Edric is my castellan. I don’t have a man.”

 

“That’s rare,” Val says. “For kneelers,” she adds a breath after she’s swallowed her next gulp of fermented nanny milk.

 

“This Dreadfort was a gift for my service.”

 

“To how many?”

 

“Pardon?”

 

“Service means one thing to kneeler men.”

 

“Oh,” Sansa starts, pausing. “Just one,” she answers.

 

“Must have made many demands then.”

 

Sansa drinks down to the dregs of her own cup, it’s sour. “Kings command,” she answers, having nothing more to say.

 

A log pops in the grate.

 

“Kneeler didn’t hang,” Val the wildling says.

 

“No,” Sansa agrees, pouring more into both their cups. “He died like an animal because he wasn’t a man anymore.” She offers out a fresh cup and they speak no more.

 

A knock comes as they slip down into the warm place of sousedness.

 

“Apologies lady Val," Edric says, nodding and turning towards Sansa. "My Lady, Prince Aegon has sent a man ahead to announce his arrival.”

 

“Very well Edric," she says taking notice of what he's brought with him. "Good you brought my cloak. Sleep well Lady Val.”

 

* * *

 

Aegon Targaryen holds court in some simulacrum of his father’s own, though it is without the fanfare or the languishing ceremonials. He sits in the seat that might be hers if she had such an occasion to hold proceedings of her own in the great hall, and she sits in the seat a wife might, or an heir.

 

She speaks first, as Mistress of the Dreadfort.

 

“I welcome here only guests who recognize the sovereignty of the wildlings beyond the wall, and the absolute protection of those who are welcomed as friends of the King.”

 

Aegon Targaryen waves two fingers of a finely boned hand and his bastard brother steps forward.

 

“Let it be known that if a man not from beyond the Wall takes up the practice of stealing a woman he accepts the risk of losing his sac,” he adds loudly from beside his brother who remains seated on the half-pace.

 

“Your majesty what say you?” a man cries out from the back of the hall, a visiting courtier that Edric will make known the name of to her later when they have left the hall.

 

“This matter has been well handled already by Lady Sansa and her advisors in my stead, what need is there for me to speak further on something already so clear? The new heir of Cerwyn will have to find a wife the traditional way," Aegon tells the hall, grinning before he continues. "By having his father barter for the daughters of another man.”

 

“Wise man,” Harrion Karstark says beside her, low enough that only she can hear it.

 

On the other side of the half pace Cley Cerwyn looks stern and shaken, but not unworthy and not afraid.

 

* * *

 

 

Harrion Karstark stands on the battlements looking over the edge and at the merlon where he wound tight the chain that hung Jonnel Cerwyn when Larence Snow's hands kept slipping on themselves when Cley Cerwyn could only stand dumb to it all.

 

Despite the warmth of the day he wears his cloak, it moves behind the back of his boots with the even wind, a breath of spring, turning everything to green again.

 

“Do you trust me Lord Harrion?” she asks softly.

 

He doesn’t startle.

 

“I cannot answer that for sure,” he answers, turning his gaze to her.

 

His face is pleasing in its stoicism after a day of such false grief and true rage all around her halls.

 

“Well, the North could do worse than I,” she says, trying for humor but with a dry enough tone to remain solemn if that is what Harrion Karstark prefers from women who have allowed him to kill for them, in some slight way.

 

“Aye, it could,” he agrees, turning towards and stepping closer.

 

She looks up at him.  “Will you trust me?” she asks.

 

He stares for a long moment at her face, then steals a quick, not quick enough, glance at the fall of her hair.

 

“I can for now,” he says.

 

She nods and gazes out on her lands, lands that yet need to be made hers, once tell spreads of Cerwyn she’ll be better obliged.

 

“I’m glad,” Harrion tells her.

 

“Glad?” Sansa ventures, face placid, waiting to shift into something that suits his mood.

 

“My sister Alys was betrothed to Jonnel. That’s why I came.”

 

Sansa smiles and for once Harrion Karstark returns it, bowing his head softly before he leaves the battlements.

 

* * *

 

 

“I plied him with poppy wine,” she admits to the Prince of the Kingdom.

 

“Lady Sansa,” Aegon Targaryen exclaims, sotto voice, amused.

 

She lets her head come forward in acceptance of what recrimination he won’t give her. “I accept what punishment there is.”

 

“Punishment,” he repeats, drawing the words between his teeth, eyes gleaming with interest in the idea.

 

She raises her own eyes.

 

Aegon waves. “Best rest he’s probably gotten since Winter ended,” he tells her, relaxing into his seat, limbs akimbo.

 

“Still, please forgive me,” she goes on, only half a jest.

 

“Of course, but tell me was it really grief you think that led Cerwyn to jump?”

 

The glance he gives the room around her shows how well he knows the truth.

 

“I don’t know what desperate men do.”

 

“Was he though? I’d think him more angry than desperate.”

 

“What does a woman know of how men think,” she asks without really asking.

 

Aegon Targaryen looks at her in such a way that she flushes, feeling like she’s been seen not for what she was or is but what she might be.

 

* * *

 

 

The wildling staggers with what must seem to others as swagger and claps him on the shoulder.

 

“You’re a big fucker,” the red bearded man tells Harrion Karstark.

 

Harrion swipes at the hand. “You smell like a fucking goat.”

 

“Randy like one too.”

 

“Tormund!” A woman cries out, impatient.

 

“Aye!”

 

“Quit yer yowling and fix your own horse.”

 

The bearded man spits.

 

“Women,” he tells Harrion.

 

The shorn princess looks up from her horse, mounts it like a man would, no skirts and no bound hair, she is something from the wild, somthing without carful charms, but Harrion is stuck to watch her put heels to her mare and ride out all the same as if she had them all.

 

* * *

 

“Why does my father call you Jon?” Sansa asks her cousin, thinking now, that things have been settled, of the letter penned by her father’s hand.

 

“It's what mine own calls me.”

 

His tone is less bitter than she’s expected, than their previous interactions would have her assume.

 

“Why?” she asks, slowly, sliding her eyes askance towards him.

 

He sighs, beast under his hand rolling it's head into his palm.

 

“Because, Jaehaerys is the name I must have and Jon is the one he wishes me to have.”

 

“After Lord Connington.” She nods and finds him looking at her once she said it.

 

“…yes.”

 

Silence settles in his soft muddle of confusion.

 

“I met him, once,” she explains.

 

“He was my father’s closest friend,” he tells her.

 

His beast settle on his booted feet, he does not move them from beneath the creature's bulk.

 

“I wouldn’t think you’d like to be called it then.”

 

“Your father told me the best man he knew was named Jon too.”

 

“What man is that?” she asks, curious for true.

 

“Jon Arryn of the Vale.”

 

“Yes,” she says, remembering the stories her father would tell her brothers. “My father is quite found of him.”

 

“There are good men just like there are unfortunate men,” he tells her.

 

She thinks of something similar she’s already told his brother. “Do you think the new young lord Cerwyn is good or unfortunate?” she asks.

 

“Neither," he says, stopping. "Or both," he adds.

 

She smiles. “The Lady Val left.”

 

“I know.”

 

“She will be alright.”

 

“…what do you know about how she will be?”

 

“Women know,” she says simply.

 

He looks darkly from under his brow at her. “What did you do?”

 

“Did you think I’d let such an offense of a Lord remain within my walls forgiven and made blameless?”

 

The softness in his eyes is unhidden and plain for a moment before he looks away from her. His jaw sharpens as he grinds clenches his teeth, it softens on a near sigh as he turns from her. “Thank you,” he says, already risen from his seat on the wall, disturbing his beast, already leaving again.

 

“My Lord,” she says, remaining to look over the land, eyes crawling over the part of the wall where a body swayed.

 

It strikes her to think of a man so sullen as her cousin, with a prince’s responsibilities, without a nobleman’s privilege, a Targaryen title but a common name.

 

She has not apologized for her drugging his drink and he has not mentioned that it has been for the best.

 

It is a tenuous accord, but an accord where none was before.

 

His great beast nuzzles her hanging hand gently as it passes her to follow at it's master's bootheels.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> again sorry for the wait, been working hard on my book and I've only been working on fic once I finish with my book stuff for the night, but hey, it's almost done. also 'arpagee' is a raped woman.


	11. Chapter 11

“So, are you staying or leaving?” he asks the man who will be king, trying not to sound too curious or too put off, it does little to help.

 

Aegon grins impishly at him over his shoulder and the back of his chair. “Eager to see me gone so soon, brother?”

 

“That’s not why I asked,” he answers.

 

His brother’s stare is gone, the chair he’s sitting in tilts, his foot leveraging his weight against the table edge. “I don’t know. I might go for a hunt. “

 

He sees him wave a hand. “You might for a hunt?” he asks.

 

“Yes, a hunt. To pass the time until the others arrive. I’m supposed to be hunting Skagosi but I’ll have to settle for venison in the meantime. I haven’t thought much of returning south, if you want my real answer.”

 

He finds himself sighing, unable to stop himself or smother it.

 

“What are you really doing here?”

 

And his brother grins again at him, the crescent of his face and one gem-like eye visible.

 

“Visiting the kingdom, letting the people see my face. Though, things have stirred themselves up, haven’t they? The farther from Winterfell a person goes the wilder the land,” Aegon says.

 

He finds himself glaring, prepared to say his peace on the topic of the North’s _wilds_ but his brother catches his look and rolls his own eyes, scoffing.

 

Aegon scowls back. “It has nothing to do with the wildlings, don’t give me that scary look.”

 

His brother’s eyes follow him as he moves back to the table and the remnants of their shared meal. “What are you talking about?” Aegon asks as he sits again.

 

“Skagosi,” Aegon answers. “Ironborn. Karstark can only do so much; the Boltons managed at least to put fear in interlocutors, but now it’s all changed and it’s all more difficult than anyone thinks it is to keep them out. It’s good that you’re here, but you’ll need to-…”

 

“I know what I need to do to make the region one of unremarkable peace,” he tells Aegon.

 

“I forget you know what you’re doing. I apologize, Jaehaerys.” The future king sounds sincere enough.

 

He snorts.

 

“I was being sincere,” Aegon insists, tilting too far back, about to flail as the chair tilts too.

 

He reaches out and rights his future king with a sure grip on his bootheel, reeling him back towards the table as his arm and one of Aegon’s boots clears half the table to the floor.

 

“You’re wan,” he observes, honest, more concerned than he’d ever give voice too, his brother looks tired.

 

The world always has work for princes he thinks, arranging his wet sleeve away from his skin.

 

“You care?” Aegon asks, tone harder than before as he tries to clear mead from his pants with the edge of his hand.

 

“Toss off” he counters, careless.

 

He’s not as tired as he could be, not as tired as his brother will be soon.

 

Aegon is avoiding something too, he’s come North to hide from it and it’s not any less clear as his time away from the south endures. One day they will both have to go home, for the first time he wonders if Aegon dreads it too.

 

Aegon resettles his boots on the floor, reaching for a cured piece of meat, speaking as he chews steadily. “Lord Stark is sending his ward ahead of his son to scout the eastern lay, I’ll be meeting with the other lords, you’ll go in my stead with the scouting party.”

 

“What would we rather not find?”

 

Aegon grins.

 

“Men with iron who want to kill you once they’ve raped your ass I think.”

 

A maidservant knocks and enters to clean the mess they’ve made of their morning meal, no doubt she will think they’ve argued and spoiled it with their temples, he makes a point to seem less recalcitrant and Aegon only tilts his head better to glance down at the girl’s form.

 

Eyes peeking up and smirk twitching on his cheek.

* * *

 

She sees him in her hall and from the window of her solar.

 

She sees him, and he sees her.

 

They speak but little, his retinue calling upon his time, missives from the south and where he goes when he wishes to be alone keep him just as much out of sight as her own duties keep her.

 

Still, she tracks him across a room when he enters and cannot help in finding the differences in his smile and his face when he returns her careful stare.

 

Aegon has his father’s look but his face is his own when he gazes at her.

* * *

 

Theon Greyjoy is dressed like his name, and the churning sea, if he smiled half as much as he does then he might always look somber.

 

He is grinning when he arrives.

 

“Well, you’ve returned here again,” she says by way of greeting, waiting for him to cross the yard with Smiler’s reins in hand.

 

“I ride faster than your brother.”

 

He always has, she remembers that he’d only ever slow for Arya riding out after them. She thinks then of an occasion of him riding ahead, face turned back to look at her but turning back before her brother or father might see.

 

It seems so far gone, the time when they were children together.

 

“Robb is coming?” she finds herself asking despite the quiet, unseen upset at the prospect of his presence.

 

Her father’s ward matches her pace and wipes a hand through his dark hair, as black as spilled ink or the leather of his gloves.

 

He wears no ornament, a beautiful man doesn’t need it she’s learned.

 

“It will take him a few days, Jory’s with him. I wouldn’t worry too much after his safety.”

 

She wouldn’t care if he fell in a horse pile.

 

“You’ve brought me something,” she says, looking back behind them at his slow horse, restful now that he’s brought its rider to journey’s end.

 

“You think?” he asks, brow raised, ever-present grin hiding somewhere behind his lips.

 

She bows her head just so, and her long hair falls around her face, he stares for a moment too long at the fire of it. She peeks up and catches him looks away. She smiles, feeling warmer when she is looked at, especially so when she is looked at kindly.

 

“Edric told me you would not be parted with your parcel.”

 

“It’s from your mother,” Theon Greyjoy tells her softly, a kind man despite his blood.

* * *

 

The days go slowly, she wonders when it will be that her brother comes, something is breathing inside of her like a living thing in wait of it.

 

She wonders if it is dread in place of some kind of happiness she should feel instead.

* * *

She hears the household daily and Robert Baratheon’s bastard comes to her solar, brought by a servant.  He looks like he has slept poorly, as a haunted man might sleep under the weight of guilt or duty.

 

“What can I do for you Gendry?”

 

“I wasn’t sure it was important enough my lady but I thought I must tell you.”

 

“Tell me what?”

 

“That lord, my lady.”

 

“Which lord, Gendry?”

 

“The one who hanged.”

 

“Lord Jonnel.”

 

And Robert Baratheon’s common bastard swallows, the round of it looks large in his throat, she watches him do it with morbid fascination. She looks up and finds him unsteady, unable to meet her eyes.

 

“I don’t think he hanged himself, my lady.”

 

“But he is dead all the same, isn’t he?”

 

“Wha-yes, I mean…”

 

She tilts her head and tries to temper her own expression into something softer so her might feel well understood.

 

“You are a good man Gendry. Don’t let such a thing trouble you,” she tells him. “Rest for the day, do not keep missing supper I the hall. It does no one any good to be ill.”

 

She smiles beatific and at ease and his edges all soften too.

 

Some men are easier to soothe than others.

 

When Edric comes to tell her there are no other’s she must speak to she speaks to him.

 

“Be a comfort to your brother, common though he is, you have the same strong blood of your father. My own would be glad to see both of his closest friend’s sons untroubled and loved by the other.”

 

Edric Storm only nods, courteous in his way, he strives to do as she asks, always.

* * *

 

“How do you find your chambers brother?”

 

“Well enough.”

 

“Good. I’m glad.”

 

She smiles but it is not returned, she tries again to be kind.

 

“Will you sup with me tonight?” she asks.

 

It is as if he’s waited for the question just to beat it down, he looks so much like some ruddier colored version of her father as he walks beside her that she feels like a child again for just a breath.

 

“I thought to be in the yard, we are preparing to hunt down raiders, it wouldn’t do to spend my time with my sister when we ought to be making plans.”

 

And his expression is one of her mother’s, a kind of delicate, feminine cruelty, her mother never wore it often, but she could, she had when they’d been in the south. She remembers. Her mother had been angry, had been aggrieved the day she left.

 

Her mother had thought she would return, triumphant with her father to reclaim her, but not even the daughter of one warden, wife to a another, could find any give in the fate of her child.

 

“Perhaps tomorrow we might break our fast together. Surely you must eat, Robb,” she tries, hating that she should, she has none of her mother’s rage, only her reluctant submission to the will of others when no amount of trying might make something so.

 

Robb stops beside her, she stops too, to look back at his face that looks so much more like a boy’s now.

 

“Mother barely speaks to father now, did you know? Uncle Edmure in the Riverlands would even think to call him weak. But what can he do?”

 

She would sigh if she were sure he would not flare angrier for it, she holds in her sorrow at seeing him so lost in the tempers of others.

 

“Surely that is for them Robb. Wives and husbands have a world their own that their children know nothing of. I would not presume to know what our father thinks or what might weigh on them both, and neither should you.”

 

Her mother’s steel is in her own voice too. She has been wronged too, been aggrieved and worried and hurt.

 

Robb scoffs.

 

“Presume? You _presume_ too much and you barely have a head for it,” he tells her nastily. He takes his step closer and puts her in his shadow. “You wish to sup or break fast with me or make gowns, sit here in this dark place that your maidenhead has bought you, but with no lord husband or child sired by a lord. Our father sits in council as his own bannermen wonder what’s to happen to us now that the King has sent his bastard north, now that the daughter of the Warden of the North is passed between Targaryens like a tavern slut and is given a seat of her own that we all know is really Lord Water’s.”

 

His face has gone red and she has no words.

 

“There is nothing honorable here, Sansa. And, what is a Stark without honor?” he asks, not needing an answer from her to think he’s right.

 

She makes her face a mask, her eyes stones, her bearing made of iron.

 

“And what would you have me do? Shall you tell me that too, or will you squeal like a little boy about the unfairness of it all, these so-thought schemes of men, what right have you or any son of any lord to question your King or your Prince or any other in his brood.”

 

Her brother steps away from her.  “I would have had you been honorable, I would not have seen you brought so low,” he says.

 

“And now you know better, and would have done better than a Tully or a Stark when asked to provide your part of what a King is due by right?”

 

He will never understand.

 

“I will not argue this with you. You could have stayed south and your absence might have kept things peaceable.”

 

He turns to walk down the way they’ve come, escaping into the darker hall.

 

She sighs, breathes again, feeling better without him, feeling less alone when she is by herself again.

* * *

 

She keens against him though they try to be quiet, though she has teeth bit into the blunt edge of the pykeson’s hand, her fine skirts up about her knees, his breeches almost around his own.

 

And Jaehaerys Waters pulls them apart while they are still heaving, the girl unable to push down her skirts quickly enough, cheeks ruddy and upperlip damp from the pykeson’s mouth.

 

“I will fucking cut you low-…” Theon Greyjoy starts before he sees who it is that has come. “My lord.”

 

It is not Sansa Stark.

 

It is not even a kitchen wench.

 

It is just some girl from beside the Weeping River.

 

The hair is not so red and her gown is not so fine and she has freckles the color of kitchen spice.

 

The girl covers herself hastily, squeaking apologies.

* * *

 

Larence Snow fells the deer, it takes three arrows but it falls quite neatly, quite quickly among a tangle of roots and bogged forest humus.

 

“How did you become a squire you little shit?” Theon Greyjoy asks from the tree limb above them. “I thought for sure you’d be hung as an outlaw by now, joined up with the second sons, or dressed as a girl and whoring in Bravvos.”

 

“I’ll fell you like a tree, Greyjoy,” Larence Snow says without muttering, eyeing the raider’s son like rotten fruit.

 

The quiet Alleras comes from beyond the trees with a handful of rabbits on his belt, eyes neatly shot out, pelts pristinely skinned from their rangy carcasses.

 

Theon Greyjoy drops down, hanging first by his hands, arcing out, then landing solidly on the muddy forest floor.

 

The walk beside each other behind the rest, back towards the keep.

 

Ghost roams on the edges of his vision, not hunting or stalking, merely unaccustomed to company.

 

“I have not apologized properly for my rudeness,” he begins.

 

Theon Greyjoy nods but offers his own near apology. “Your rudeness was surprising, I misspoke and I regret it.”

 

“Perhaps next time a room,” he suggests for the man’s encounters with women of a certain kind.

 

“A room is often times less manageable and requires the production of more coin.”

 

It’s strange, Jaehaerys realizes, his own surprise that a man like Theon Greyjoy would have to pay, but quite suddenly he remembers the man is no better than a captive.

* * *

 

“Your father is proud, it’s made your brother a terror to be around,” Theon Greyjoy had told her.

 

And she’d smiled.

 

There was something sad in Lord Stark’s hostage-ward then.

 

Jaehaerys Waters knows the man loves Sansa Stark but can refuse it without putting it away, without hating her as it’s cause.

 

Theon Greyjoy is simply a man who understands the way of things.

 

“My brother worries too much about the opinions of others.”

 

“He only loves his mother, believed his father to be faultless, your mother is sadder and your father is as worried as a man might be for his wife, you’ve come home and your brother is no boy. You are no child, but he can still pretend he is.”

 

“How are the rest?”

 

The man laughed. “Bran wants to meet Jaime Lannister, Arya wishes to see the lands.”

 

“They’re both old enough for betrothals,” Sansa Stark says without lilt to the words.

 

“Robb will be soon. A Karstark, perhaps. She’s young still.”

 

“And Manderly has granddaughters enough for Bran.”

 

“For your sister it’s less sure, she’s wilder than your brothers.”

 

“The Vale, or the Riverlands if Uncle Edmure’s wife has a boy.”

 

“It would be a rare thing for all of you to stay North of the Neck.”

 

She’d hummed. “The Reeds might have suitable matches, but no further South than the Riverlands and even then it is unlikely.”

 

“You think so?”

 

“Yes, the North will be asked no more than this.”

 

“This?”

 

“I’m tired Theon, no games.”

 

“Forgive me.”

 

They part ways in the hall, he sits in the cut of the window watching the night move, the moon pass behind the clouds, a watcher and a listener in the dark.

* * *

 

“What man would have her now?” he hears Lord Stark’s son ask his father’s ward.

 

“Not all men care much about what women have done with other men, if they did, no one would marry a widow.”

 

“A widow is not dishonored.”

 

“Stay close Theon, I’ll be back.”

 

“Alright.”

 

He does not move from the hall as Lord stark’s son comes from the rookery and sees him in the hall.

 

“Lord Waters, you’re well?”

 

“Quite, Lord stark.”

 

It’s all the greeting they care to exchange, Lord Stark’s son passes him by and he goes on to see what messages the sky brings.

 

Theon Greyjoy’s hands are white on the edge of the table as he stands again.

 

“You hate him,” he says.

 

“I don’t hate anyone,” Theon Greyjoy tells him.

 

“You lie through that smile Greyjoy.”

 

“My horse lies through his smiles,” the raider’s son answers in retort.

 

He moves to the ravens, opens one’s cage to have it perch on the edge of his hand as he turns to look at Theon Greyjoy’s face.

 

He’s watched the man speak with the daughter of Eddard Stark like she’s still some fine untouched daughter of a lord his own father might try to bid for as a wife for his son.

 

But Sansa Stark is a King’s whore and Theon Greyjoy is a hostage of war.

 

“Is it because you care for his sister?” Jaehaerys finds himself asking.

 

“Wards don’t hate or care for anyone, they’re only grateful to be kept _alive_.”

 

And here is a man who has not forgotten his place, he thinks, finding that he can admire something about their shared circumstance.

 

“It doesn’t bother you then? How he treats his own sister?”

 

“I have a sister,” Greyjoy tells him, in a tone that says more than he might with words on what he thinks of _sisters_.

 

“So do I, but answer my question Greyjoy.”

 

He thinks of Rhaenys, her girlish whim intermixed with the kind of deviancy only a King’s daughter could be excused for, nothing cruel or unforgivable, only a kind of crass loveliness a girl whose future is sure might have but never the kind of crassness freedom affords. His own sister is a trapped thing, like he, or Aegon or even Sansa Stark.

 

They may act how they like so long as they also act accordingly for their fates.

 

“I’ve learned that most women don’t have any choice in what becomes of them,” the pykeson tells him, releasing his grip on the table edge so he can turn and sit upon it.

 

“Like salt wives and stone wives?”

 

Theon Greyjoy scowls and shakes his head, looking away, making his face change into something less hostile before he speaks again.

 

“Salt wives are taken in conquest, call it brutal if you like, but at least they’re called _wives_ and there’s only as much shame in it as there is when a man takes a wife any other way. You don’t understand I think; his sister came back home to scorn, as a mistress, not a wife or a widow. If I had the choice I’d never go home and I honestly don’t know why she bothered.”

 

The bird on his hand preens, he attaches the message he’s meant to send, not needing a maester to help him with it.

 

The pykeson doesn’t look anywhere but ahead of himself and at the wall.

 

“Scorn makes girls strong until they die in childbed. She won’t need to suffer unless she chooses it for herself, or unless her king tells her too.”

* * *

 

At night his body remembers a woman.

 

The woman is dead but it doesn’t matter when he sleeps.

 

He wakes up feeling sour.

* * *

 

“Now who looks wan?” his brother teases as they sup together in the hall.

 

Jaime Lannister stands close, Barristan Selmy mirroring his reserve on the other side of them both like some vision of what’s to come for Tywin Lannister’s eldest son.

 

“Don’t make a face, it’s a nice evening isn’t it?” Aegon teases further. And more seriously then goes on. “I’m leaving to go scouting, Lannister will come, Barristan will stay, and you will watch things here.”

 

“When?”

 

“Before day. Theon Greyjoy and Robb Stark come too.”

 

“The Wildlings will find you.”

 

“Good.”

 

“Will you take Ghost?”

 

“He only listens to you.”

 

“Barely.”

 

“If it makes you feel better send him after you’ve started scouting.”

 

“It would.”

 

“Go dance with Lady Stark.”

* * *

 

He has not had a woman in his arms, so close, in a long time it seems.

 

She smells nothing like the other, too clean, without sweat or the wild on her, the stink of fur and blood and seed.

 

Though, he supposes it has not always been so the she’s smelled so clean.

 

She moves him more than he could move her, more practiced than he, making him seem a better partner to her than he could ever truly be.

 

He does not plod on her feet and can keep time well enough it’s all that’s needed of him.

 

Aegon watches them like a King would, vastly amused with himself in all things.

 

The dance ends and he drinks though he’s drunk enough, more than he should.

 

He wonders at the scent of her, wonders what she smells like beneath the fine fixture of a lady she moves across the hall as, surely she is not so much a lady.

 

He knows Margaery Tyrell, knows the Queen of Thorns has no true lady for a granddaughter, he can only imagine what a girl like Sansa Stark had learned from her.

 

Aegon smothers a chuckle on his fist, water in place of wine in his cup.

 

He imagines his brother as ceaseless as their father with his whims and wants and sudden passions, more tempered though, calculating like his Dornish mother, a viper that waits, a dragon with venom, a serpent with wings.

 

Sansa Stark is still too delicate a thing for the carelessness of his brother, the whims he has that are all his own, tempestuous; soft handed but a storm.

 

When the dance is done his brothe watches him come back to his seat.

 

“Lannister, help my brother to bed before he falls asleep in his mutton.”

 

He doesn’t refuse the hands that help him from the table, lets his brother think his inebriation is only to avoid goodbyes before the morrow comes; whatever is easiest to believe is what Aegon will live by.

 

He wants a woman in his bed tonight, would be no use to one, he wants the one he used to have, one that belongs to other, he wants to steal one, keep one and be comforted again. It’s been a long time since he knew comfort. 

* * *

 

He finds the pykeson before he is gone. He had left as he’s danced with Sansa Stark.

 

“I thought that girl was-” he begins to say, still drunk, aching for a piss and his bed, not knowing why he’s stumbled from it in the half-light of dawn.

 

Theon Greyjoy does not look up from his bow, waiting on his knees to be oiled and tended before being put to use. “Don’t say it,” the pykeson warns. “If you do I’ll strike you and then they’ll take my hand and I need my hand for my bow so don’t fucking say what you think you need to say because it doesn’t need to be said,” Theon Greyjoy warns him.

 

He doesn’t know why he persists in pursuit of answers from the man.

 

“Why haven’t you asked her?”

 

The pykeson scoffs, eyes wide and then narrow with suspicion as he turns his gaze to him.

 

“Ask her for what? Please, Prince, I’m a ward.” The pykeson chuckles. “I would ask Lord Stark. And he would say no, because he is honorable.”

 

“…”

 

“He would say no because a man has a right to an unspoiled bride, and the only thing I could argue would to call myself my father’s son. A hostage could only hope to do as good as a spoiled girl for a wife, a lord’s unfortunate and unwanted daughter. And Lord Stark would have to admit me no more his son than a dog and I would have to call myself Balon Greyjoy’s cast off seed. The Honorable Ned Stark and The Proud Theon Greyjoy. We have no right to claim her.”

 

“You’re a fool for ever thinking it in the first place. No one has claim of her now, no one ever will. That’s how it is.”

 

Theon Greyjoy’s eyes are dark and cold. “There’s always a claim, just because the King doesn’t ride all the horses in his stable it doesn’t mean they aren’t still his Lord Waters.”

* * *

 

The wolf circles her in the yard.

 

Aegon laughs and his brother watches from the wall.

 

“Call your beast away brother,” Aegon calls up at him from horseback.

 

Sansa twists slowly around herself. The wolf is cautious but kind and presses softly against her palm.

 

“Ghost, to me,” Jaehaerys Waters calls out as their prince rides off with the raider’s son to see the North for what it is, the Dornishman follows, and Jaime Lannister too. They go to visit the lords, they go to rally.

 

The wolf goes, and her cousin too, back into the keep.

 

She stands alone in the yard, the last of the melting snow ruining her gown’s hem, the green spines of a coming spring like the lands rough beard spearing through it.

 

In the portal of the gate house the wolf and her cousin wait.

 

“He’ll be back before the snows melt,” her cousin, that king’s bastard, tells her.

 

And, it’s strange to hear him speak when it’s not in answer to some question.

* * *

 

“You are well then?” she asks.

 

He is a good man, though he tries hard to seem something other than a man, an expressionless thing, a beast meant to answer to commands.

 

He is sad, she thinks then, her cousin who might have been a prince.

 

“Quite,” he answers, more than she’s received from him before he walks from her.

 

She smiles, pleased, amused in some small way she hadn’t expected.

* * *

 

The people of the castle prefer her to the Boltons. Anyone would be preferred to the Snow bastard and his bloody father he decides.

 

There is something of the south in her, yes, but beyond that she is made of winter and a song of spring.

 

Light burns in her window through the night and it must be some habit of waiting, always waiting, he understands. He trains in the yard or walks with his wolf, it is days before he recognizes that the thought of someone else awake is a comfort to him.

 

It is what he foolishly moves towards, though he does not think it foolish until much later.

* * *

 

He comes more or less uninvited, her lady maid tired and rumpled, sleeping on a cot in the solar, answering the door on the late hour. He is admitted and the maid is sent back to real bed.

 

He is wary of the talk that will travel through the castle by dawn, though he suspects if he were to voice such concerns his cousin would dissuade him with talk of how she trusts her household.

 

“You’re making a gown.”

 

She is wearing it though it is cold in her chambers, a play of swatches near transparent in the light, though not immodest her skin is pale and her hair is fire, the insinuation of her waist and legs something stranger than spring after a long winter.

 

“For the queen, in the dornish style and what was popular before I left. Some mix of the two,” she answers, smiling easily.

 

“It will suit her.”

 

She offers her seat to him, leaves for her bedchamber before she returns again, bed cloak around her.

 

He wishes she had not.

 

The dress would suit a woman’s husband more and it will be lost on Elia’s who has not visited her bed since Rhaenys’ birth, it’s a wonder Aegon has a sister to be wed upon one day should it be necessary.

 

“She’s a beautiful woman,” he says.

 

His cousin is a beautiful woman. And her hair is like blood, the heartstring’s of a dragon, of two, of three, perhaps.

 

She waits because she understands better than he does why he has come, why her lighted chambers make him feel less lonely so far from a home he hates and a father her despises.

 

Her eyes do not close when he puts his mouth to hers, neither do his own but he doesn’t think either of them mind such things. She’s wary and stiff, at first, he’s too rough with his mouth, pride and proving in his kiss.

 

He pushes free her bed cloak and she takes off the gown she’s made with careful hands, he wishes he could ruin the work of it and not feel guilty for it, but he can’t, he does not, he’s not a real prince, he cannot do everything he wishes.

 

Aegon would have torn it and his father would have made her wear it. He slicks her mouth with his tongue to fill his mind with more of her instead of them, reaches fingers to fill her with more of him.

 

The hot slide of her tongue over his and the hot slick of her cunt in his hand hold him as much as he’s holding her.

 

He doesn’t startle when she presses open his jacket, his shirt, hands moving and holding and pressing fire into his skin.

 

She knows how to touch, is as familiar as a lover already and as easy to enjoy, it makes uneasy warmth slither down between his legs as he opens them to bring her closer, having brought them backwards to her bed he knows he is just as lonely as she.

* * *

 

He looks at her in a different gown.

 

She’s risen from her bed, dispassionate or per functionary in her work, her movements.

 

She hasn’t forgotten him but she acts as a man might, rising to read a letter or leave for war and he the woman, watching and waiting for her to make him warm again, hating what she’s made of him.

 

He watches her and wonders what it was like when she was still his father’s and he cannot make the thoughts die.

 

He wonders if she was left to languish behind in a bed draped in his father’s colors, if she loved him as a woman or a girl, or something that has made her weaker for his father, for his brother, for him, made her sick because of it, to love like a daughter, like a child, like a sister.

 

He thinks of Rhaenys and he wants to retch, he thinks of his brother and wants to tear his own skin.

 

“What do you wish would happen?” she asks from her seat beside the hearth, gown she’s not yet finished working over her knees, shorter and smaller and heavier than the other, her bed robe open between her breasts, a pale expanse he pressed his breath into, driving up inside her like a beastly thing devoid of finer thought.

 

She had taken him and her mouth had opened as he pressed the breath from her.

 

“I never want to see King’s Landing again,” he confides.

 

“They don’t know anything about the cold in the Red Keep,” she says, nothing in her voice but response, words, speech, no inflection, thoughtless.

 

He stares at her hands in the hearth light, the fingers he told her to put inside herself before he put them in his mouth. “…who is that one for.” There’s no question, just speech, more words between them, his mind stuck beneath her bedrobe, between her bent knees, at the wild scent of her cleft.

 

“Your sister, but she is still smaller than me, I need to find a girl to fit it to.”

 

“I’ll send Larence Snow.”

 

She laughs, he smiles weakly, thinking of her breasts chafed by his beard, how they’ll hurt her in the bath.

 

“You have a smile like my sister,” she tells him. “My father says she looks a good deal like his own people.”

 

He still feels lonely, sadder than before and he thinks that she does not look happy either.

 

“I’m going to fall asleep in your bed,” he tells her, unable to care anymore.

 

“You may. I can’t anymore, not after. Not even milk of the poppy helps. You become used to it, after just enough time,” she tells him, much later, from her place across the room, in her chair, unable to sleep, not wanting to.

 

There is debasement she’s craved, he thinks, from the act, he’s learned her yearning for it, finding it written in the curve of her back, her hair like blood in his hands, the eager parting of her sex to the force of him.

 

His beard and fingers smell of her and he presses his palm between his face and the pillow.

 

Her careful fingers playing upon her breast where he’s bitten, unconcerned, prodding the pain of it leave him to press weakly against her bed.

 

She is far away from him, placed inside herself as deeply as he’d put himself.

**Author's Note:**

> I promise I will return to the fair wrought house has fallen and there all honor lies soon, original book stuff has kept me very busy (that and comic-con)


End file.
